On Saving Time
“Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.” The first of the 124 letters a Roman philosopher wrote to a friend about how to live.
Read the letter → Benjamin Franklin · 1772Moral Algebra
A friend asks what he should do. Franklin won’t tell him — he tells him how to decide. The birth of the pros and cons list.
Read the letter → Abigail Adams · 1776Remember the Ladies
Three months before independence, a wife reminds the man writing the new laws who they leave out.
Read the letter → John Keats · 1819The Vale of Soul-Making
At twenty-three, grieving his brother, a young poet decides what all the pain in the world might be for.
Read the letter → Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1855I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career
America’s most famous writer reads a strange book of poems by an unknown printer and writes him the letter every beginner dreams of.
Read the letter → Grace Bedell & Abraham Lincoln · 1860Let Your Whiskers Grow
An eleven-year-old tells a presidential candidate how to win. Both letters in full — and what he did next.
Read the letter → Abraham Lincoln · 1864The Bixby Letter
A hundred and forty words of consolation to a grieving mother — maybe the most beautiful letter an American president ever sent.
Read the letter → Vincent van Gogh · 1880A Great Fire in Our Soul
Out of work, broken and estranged from his brother, a twenty-seven-year-old writes the letter that turns his life toward painting.
Read the letter → Mark Twain · 1889What Great Births You Have Witnessed
For Walt Whitman’s seventieth birthday, the great cynic writes the most hopeful letter of his life.
Read the letter →Modern classics
Still under copyright, and each page names who holds it. They run as the passages that matter most, with the story of the letter and where to read it whole.
Ernest Hemingway · 1934Go On and Write
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of…” Tough love from one writer to a friend who’d stopped believing in himself.
Read the letter → E. B. White · 1973Wind the Clock
A stranger writes that he has given up on the human race. The author of Charlotte’s Web writes back.
Read the letter → Kurt Vonnegut · 2006Make Your Soul Grow
Five high schoolers invite their favorite author to visit. He can’t come, so he gives them homework instead.
Read the letter →Also in the library: great speeches · quotes I love · the people who inspire me
One short essay on optimism, purpose, and enough — every Saturday morning.
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