In 1956, the editor William Maxwell was having some trouble with beetles in his roses. “[W]hen I come on the shreds of one that was exquisite in the morning and raddled by noon,” he wrote to one of ...

This story was originally published on April 24, 2025, and has been updated. The art of letter writing is not dead. Rachel Syme, a New Yorker staff writer, learned that during the early days of the ...

This article originally appear in October 1984 issue of Town & Country. I am not among those who believe that letter writing is dead. My idea of heaven, in fact, is having at least four letters to ...

Letters did not count [as writing]. A woman might write letters while sitting by her father’s sick-bed. She could write them by the fire while the men talked without disturbing them. The strange thing ...

"What is healing, but a shift in perspective?” — Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast Transactional writing — or letter writing — gets you beyond what you thought you could not get over. With all the other ways ...