Kategoria BISAC: Literary Collections >> Letters

The letters in Volume 12 cover Erasmus' correspondence for all of 1526 and roughly the first quarter of 1527. This was a difficult period for Erasmus for various reasons, including two bouts of illness serious enough to cause him to draw up his first will in January 1527, and the fact that the Reformers were gaining more and more influence over religious policy in Basel, where he resided. Tension caused by Erasmus' open opposition to this trend was multiplied by the continuing decline in his relations with Oecolampadius, Pellicanus, and Zwingli, all of them former friends or even...

The year that began in August 1515 was the annus mirabilis of Erasmus' career, the year, notably of the epistles of St Jerome and the first edition of his New Testament. In the months following, covered in this volume of the CWE, from August 1516 to June 1517, the active exchange of letters that began with volume 3 continued, giving a vivid impression of the impact of Erasmus' great achievement upon his contemporaries. In his own words, "The New Testament has made me friends everywhere."

To Erasmus, the most important event of these months was intensely private, the...

This volume covers the first ten months of Erasmus' residence at Louvain. He lived during this time in the College of the Lily, his position presitgious and secure. he was a member of the theological faculty, yet free of regular academic duties and entitled to receive a regular income more than adequate to his modest needs. His predominant task in the course of these months was the re-editing of the New Testament, which he considered his magnum opus: through his work on the New Testament the use he made of his time and talent would be judged by God and man alike. There are frequent...

A painful time in Erasmus' life is reflected in this volume of letters. As the two volumes immediately previous to this one indicated, Erasmus' first two years in Louvain were agreeable, productive, and carefree. But the spirit of congenial scholarship in which he lived at this time was gradually giving way to bitter conflict and controversy: Louvain was merely a microcosm of Erasmus' entire world, which was undergoing great strain. The exuberant expectancy of a Golden Age of civilized Christianity was yielding to the bleak prospect of helplessly watching the progress of what Erasmus...

The period from April 1523 to December 1524 finds Erasmus still in Basel and still preoccupied above all with 'the sorry business of Luther.' He knows that the efforts of his conservative Catholic detractors to prove that he had 'laid the egg that Luther hatched' can be overcome only if he takes an unambiguous public stand against Luther, and friendly princes and prelates constantly urge him to do so. But he dreads the controversy that an attack on Luther will arouse and fears that the overthrow of Luther will entail the defeat of all wholesome reform.

This reluctance to 'enter the...

Ephraim Weber (1870-1956) was a struggling young writer when he began corresponding with L.M. Montgomery (1874-1942) in 1902, six years before she published her first novel. Weber's initial letter was that of an admirer. Montgomery responded warmly, and the two quickly began a correspondence that became an intellectual mainstay for both of them over the following forty years. After Green Gables is a fascinating collection of letters sent by Montgomery to Weber between 1916 and 1941. This was the period of Montgomery's greatest literary success, but privately she was deeply troubled...

Northrop Frye's status as one of the most influential critics and intellectuals of the twentieth century makes it difficult to gauge the personal qualities of the man behind the work. However, an intimate picture is revealed through the correspondence Frye exchanged with his first wife, Helen Kemp, and which he bequeathed to Victoria College at the time of his death. In A Glorious and Terrible Life with You, Margaret Burgess presents the essential narrative at the heart of the correspondence, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and formative experiences of the two central...

Northrop Frye's status as one of the most influential critics and intellectuals of the twentieth century makes it difficult to gauge the personal qualities of the man behind the work. However, an intimate picture is revealed through the correspondence Frye exchanged with his first wife, Helen Kemp, and which he bequeathed to Victoria College at the time of his death. In A Glorious and Terrible Life with You, Margaret Burgess presents the essential narrative at the heart of the correspondence, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and formative experiences of the two central...

"Excellent. This is a fine, and unusual, collection of literary Americana."--Atlantic

"Fine comic moments of truth."--New York Times Book Review

"An invaluable source of literary history."--Publishers Weekly

This is the story of one of the most famous literary "sets" of the twentieth century. Gerald and Sara Murphy were at the center of a group including Ernest Hemingway and his wives, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Phillip Barry, and many others. They...

In this expanded edition of Randall Jarrell's letters, his widow, Mary, has added letters from Jarrell to Peter Taylor, publication of which was withheld during Taylor's lifetime. Taylor was, along with Robert Lowell, Jarrell's oldest and closest friend, and the inclusion of these incomparable letters adds another dimension of friendship, artistry, and intellect to a collection already noted for its behind-the-scenes glimpse of twentieth-century American literary history in the making.