Loss to Archives; Today’s Literary Letters are in Unsaved Email
Friday, September 9th, 2005It was easy to miss Literary Letters, Lost in Cyberspace by Rachel Donadio in the Times on September 4, 2005.
Biography, straight up or fictionalized, is arguably one of today’s richest literary forms, but it relies on a kind of correspondence that’s increasingly rare, or lost in cyberspace. This year alone Farrar, Straus & Giroux published ‘’The Letters of Robert Lowell'’ and a biography of the critic Edmund Wilson that draws on his letters. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the company is saving its own communication with writers. ‘’I try to save substantive correspondence about issues concerning books we’re working on, or about our relations with authors, but I’m sure I don’t always keep the good stuff — particularly the personal interchanges, which is probably what biographers would relish,'’ Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said (via e-mail, of course, like most of the editors and writers interviewed for this story). ‘’I don’t think we’ve addressed in any systematic way what the long-term future of these communications is, but I think we ought to.'’