Kategoria BISAC: Literary Collections >> Letters

Benjamin Disraeli was perhaps the most colourful Prime Minister in British history. This seventh volume of the highly acclaimed Benjamin Disraeli Letters edition shows also that he was a dedicated, resourceful, and farsighted statesman. It contains 670 letters written between 1857 and 1859. They address friends, family, political colleagues, and, not least, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

During this period, Disraeli shepherded a fragile Conservative government through the Indian Mutiny, the Second Opium War with China, the Orsini bomb plot, and the...

In the early years of his performing career, Will Rogers was a vaudeville performer of limited prominence. Around the age of thirty-five, however, this Oklahoma cowboy philosopher shed his role as local stage entertainer and moved toward fame as a Broadway star and nationally beloved humorist. This documentary history, volume four in the definitive five-volume Papers of Will Rogers, reveals Rogers s personal and professional transformation during what may have been the most productive period of his diverse career.

Between 1915 and 1928 the years covered by this volume Rogers developed...

An important primary source for eighty years, Lee's Dispatches is now once again available to Civil War scholars, students, and enthusiasts. When first published in 1914, these letters, written between June 2, 1862, and April 1, 1865, put Lee's strategy in clearer perspective and shed new light on certain of his moves that had been in dispute.

As Douglas Southall Freeman states in the Introduction, every written line of Lee's was a lesson in war. For example, the letters reveal that in 1862, when plans for the defense of Richmond were under review, the Confederate high command considered...

Far more than a documentation of the horrors and banality of the Civil War, John Preston Sheffey's literate and witty writings demonstrate his ardor for battle, his love of Virginia, and his passion in waging a most arduous and suspenseful campaign: to win Josephine Spiller as his wife. Superbly edited by James I. Robertson, Jr., Sheffey's letters are the first published correspondence by a member of the 8th Virginia Cavalry. A native of Marion, Virginia, Sheffey provides an invaluable picture of socio-military affairs in the overlooked western and southwestern regions of the state. His...

The only collection of all known letters of Christopher Smart provides the best psychological explanation to date of that complex and elusive eighteenth-century poet.

The significant characteristics that distinguish Smart s prose letters from his poetry, Betty Rizzo and Robert Mahony note, are that his letters were requests for assistance while his verses were bequests, gifts in which he set great store. Indeed, it was Smart s lifelong conviction that he was a poet of major importance.

As Smart biographer Karina Williamson notes, "The splendidly informative and vivaciously written...

J. Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a twenty-year-old sophomore when he was introduced to fellow student Robert Lax (1915-2000) in the Columbia University cafeteria in 1935. They were brought together by an admiration for each other's writing in the college humor magazine. Upon graduation in 1938, Merton converted to Roman Catholicism; Lax began graduate study in English and took a job at the New Yorker. Three years later, Merton entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, and he and Lax saw each other only four more times. Yet their friendship was sustained for the next thirty-three years...

While Father is Away reveals the intimate story of a British-American's role in the American Civil War. William Bradbury's letters home provide a rare window on the unique relationships among husband, wife, and children while a father was away at war.

Yorkshire attorney turned Union volunteer soldier Bradbury became a "privileged private" with extraordinary access to powerful Union generals including Daniel Butterfield, future president Benjamin Harrison, and Clinton B. Fisk, the region's administrator for the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction.

The letters also...

In recent years Christina Rossetti's star has soared. Rossetti (1830-1894) has come to be considered one of the major poets--not just one of the major women poets--of the Victorian era, eclipsing her famous brother. Leading critics have demonstrated how studies of Rossetti's work, her daily life, her relationships with the Pre-Raphaelites, and her interactions with other women authors of the period can help us understand the unique cultural situation of Victorian women writers. When complete in four volumes, this project will make available all of Rossetti's extant letters, almost...

The letters in this second volume -expose a woman of powerful intellect, complex emotions, unshakeable convictions, and loving heart.- Rossetti, forty-three years old in 1874, is now an established poet with a strong literary reputation among her contemporaries. But, as Harrison points out in his introduction to the volume, -two thirds of her life was over, and its losses were mounting.- The marriage of William Michael, the death of her sister, Maria, Dante Gabriel's addiction to chloral and the illness that led to his death in 1882, and the deaths of close personal and family friends...