Yours Ever People and Their Letters

From the author ofA Book of One's OwnandStolen Wordscomes a delightful and wide-ranging investigation of the art of letter writing. Yours Everexplores the offhand masterpieces dispatched through the ages by messenger, postal service, and BlackBerry. Thomas Mallon weaves a remarkable assortment of epistolary riches into his own insightful and eloquent commentary on the circumstances and characters of the world's most intriguing letter writers. Here are Madame de Sevigne's devastatingly sharp reports from the court of Louis XIV, F. Scott Fitzgerald's tormented advice to his young daughter, the besotted midlife billets-doux of a suddenly rejuvenated Woodrow Wilson, the casually brilliant spiritual musings of Flannery O'Connor, the lustful boastings of Lord Byron, the cries from prison of Sacco and Vanzetti. Along with the confessions and complaints and revelations sent from battlefields, frontier cabins, and luxury liners, a reader will find Mallon considering travel bulletins, suicide notes, fan letters, and hate mailforms as varied as the human experiences behind them. Yours Everis an exuberant reintroduction to a vast and entertaining literaturea book that will help to revive, in the digital age, this glorious lost art.

THOMAS MALLON is the author of seven novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman and Fellow Travelers. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. He lives in Washington, D.C.


From the Hardcover edition.