Emails of a…
Two of my favorite books, Letters from a Stoic and Old Gorgon Graham: Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son, are made up of private correspondences that weren’t intended to be public. It’s an incredibly influential form of writing. For instance, the poet John Keats most important concept was never published – just mentioned briefly in a personal letter.
I wonder when someone will publish the first book of private emails between two notable figures. The medium has been in use for 20 solid years now – surely enough writers, public intellectuals or entrepreneurs gone back and forth over interesting topics by now. Plus, the best books in this genre tend to be from people whose career was cut short, making people more willing to consider additional sources of material.
Does anyone know of a book like this? I’m not talking about collections of forwarded chain emails, which are somewhat common. If there isn’t one already, I can’t imagine we’ll have to wait too long for it.
I know it’s not as profound as some of the people you were envisioning, but there is book of the e-mails between Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan over the Red Sox World Series winning season. I think it’s in the same vein as what you are referring to.
Letters from a Stoic were almost certainly written for publication and were one of Seneca’s major literary accomplishments in his lifetime. It is, in truth, a compilation of private essays more than the record of an actual correspondence. More analogous to a blog than an email exchange.
-Alex
Link to Old Gorgon Graham ebook http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12106
regarding the Keats letter, the wiki says those ideas are in fact expressed in The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream… but I get the point
Great email conversations will no doubt be published…. I think people will also start OKing the publishing of their entire gmail accounts (chats and all) after they die
Along the same veign as what you’re asking about: http://myrsky.net/faust3/danimal-archive
Not emails, but faxes…
http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Tea-Creation-Business-Personal/dp/0385420579
“The Mansion of Many Apartments is a metaphor that the poet John Keats expressed in a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds dated Sunday, 3 May 1818.” The letter is the source of the idea, not the allusion to it in a poem published a year later.
From some of your posts, it sounds like you know some pretty notable people. If you don’t mind me asking, what’s stopping you from compiling such a collection yourself?
Emails have replaced letters as the modern day correspondence, so maybe in a few more decades when all of the people that wrote the emails are dead there will be more of these types of books published, provided there is still a traditional publishing industry.
I enjoyed reading Advice to a Young Wife from an Old Mistress. It’s a short little book and is from the perspective of a mistress talking to a new wife, and while it’s just written as kind of a one way address, if that book were an email exchange with a new wife’s perspective as well, I probably would be interested in reading that.
Maybe one of the dangers of email exchanges vs. actual letter writing with pen and paper involves the fact that email is so off the cuff. It’s much more unfiltered and way too easy to put the trigger on the ‘send’ button. When people commit to pen and paper they think about what they’ve written a bit more, and it takes premeditation to actually fold the letter, put it into an envelope and affix a stamp to it. If I did that with every email I send, I would probably only send about one third of the emails I send. Yet with that said there are many people I correspond with via email and have been for years and prefer writing to the phone.
Sometimes I get so sick of writing but it’s like my primary form of communication… I never even got a ‘birds and bees’ conversation from my mom– just a letter slid under my door, and she was down the hall.
Speaking of letters, I read this review of a biography on Muriel Spark and thought of your blog. A man Spark had an affair with sold her letters to a collector.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/books/review/McGrath-t.html