Letters of the Century

Introduction In 1955, the day after Jonas Salk announced that he had found a vaccine for polio, an expectant mother in Nyack, New York, sat down to write him a letter. The gratitude she expressed in this letter still mingles, on its pages, with a note of relief and longing, and an echo of recent pain. The difference between knowing that Americans were grateful to Jonas Salk and reading this letter to him is like the difference between knowing the words of a song and hearing it sung. Letters give history a voice. This book celebrates that voice, as it has changed and deepened, whispered and shouted, wept and teased, laughed and pleaded, throughout the letters written during the last hundred years in America. Yet this is not a book about letters. It is a book about the twentieth century, as told in letters. The 423 letters printed in this volume are arranged chronologically--with the hope that as you read them, you will feel as if you are hearing successive verses in a national ballad. Throughout the last hundred years--beginning, in fact, with the very first letter in this book--observers have lamented the fact that people don't write letters anymore. Yet letters have described most of the century's major events, have reflected or reflected upon most of its social and cultural trends, have captured most of its political passions, and have been written by most of its principal figures. We may think we've heard the whole story, but that story resonates more deeply when we read the century's letters. Part of the reason for that resonance is the immediacy of letters. Letters are what history sounds like when it is still part of everyday life. While aftershocks from the San Francisco earthquake continue, a man who owns a clothing store recounts the terror of watching it burn. A teacher who doesn't yet know how many friends of hers have been killed describes being forced to leave her home during the St. Louis race riots of 1919. A nurse living in Honolulu tells her brother in Ohio how the smoke looks over Pearl Harbor just a few hours after the bombing. Immediate and evocative, letters witness and fasten history, catching events as they happen. Sometimes letters even shape those events: the order to drop the bomb on Hiroshima; the Lindbergh baby ransom note; Nixon's letter of resignation. In addition to immediacy, letters have intimacy, and this, too, gives history resonance. Lord Byron wrote: "Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude and good company," and the safety of that combination seems to inspire the courage to be honest. Dreams are confided in letters--both the nightmares and the hopes. Love is confided in letters--without fear of hearing laughter. Sex and jealousy, money and drugs: all of these are subjects that the intimacy of letters allows. A young man dying of AIDS describes to his parents how he wants to be buried. A woman tells her mother about having an abortion. An illegal immigrant reveals for his family his journey across the border. A lot of the joy of reading letters comes from hearing the ring of unaffected truth. People describe things in letters, in passing, that they take for granted but we need not. The pack of wolves passing the schoolhouse near the shack of a lone woman homesteader. The code words for ordering liquor during the dry days of Prohibition. The overcrowded schedule of a doctor's loyal secretary during the 1950s. The Kennedy calendars adorning the walls of ramshackle houses in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. These are the little details that refresh even the most familiar events. The same thing happens with the most familiar people. When Charlie Chaplin was offered his first film contract and sat down to write an ecstatic letter to his brother, he could not have known that that letter would survive him: as a consequence, we get to hear all his youthful, unsophisticated enthusiasm--misspellings and alGrunwald, Lisa is the author of 'Letters of the Century', published 2008 under ISBN 9780385315937 and ISBN 0385315937.