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Letters/E-mails
This has been linked to a bit already, but what the heck.
So my question, Is e-mail really the boon to literary biographers that people appear to believe it is?
I guess what I’m asking is how many pieces of correspondence do you need before you can build a coherent picture of what was going on in a writer’s life at a certain point? And doesn’t the amount of periodical coverage that major writers are now subjected to make up somewhat for the loss of pen-and-paper letters that they are now writing less of?
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Maybe it’ll force biographers and other such scholars to come up with new, more creative ways of approaching an author’s life than merely the letters or countless emails written. Letters were never all-encompassing, or comprehensive ways of grasping someone’s life. Our lives are multi-dimensional. We communicate in a variety of ways. We have telephone conversations now, the internet, BLOGGING–what biographer is out there trying to piece together someone’s life based on phone conversations? Some things are harder than others to grasp, and we must always remember that no matter how intricately researched, no biography can capture the eccentricities and complete reality of any one person’s life. But by coming up with new ways to circumvent obvious obstacles brought on by the fact that we are in constant communication these days, maybe we can come up with new biographies, new styles to approach thinking and writing about another person’s life.
I hope more that the authors I am interested in are sticking to the old ways and corresponding through letters.
It seems like so little of genuine value is transmitted through e-mail – as has been pointed out in many other places, it’s instantaneous and we can e-mail each other twenty times a day, and so it seems to negate the need for any lengthy letters that give the writer room to really hold forth.
It’s like reading a note passed in class instead of a thought-out, cared-for communication.
I would be much more interested in a letter written by an author than an e-mail. Maybe that’s just personal preference, though.
My life, my e-mails
Scott Esposito links to an interesting collection of snippets about the use of e-mails in writing biographies. While some writers seem to think their e-mails might be of use to future biographers, others are more skeptical. First of all, there is the t…