News from the Republic of Letters Vol. 12 : Autumn and Winter 2003/04

by BELLOW SAUL

• ISBN13: 9781592640362
• ISBN10: 1592640362
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: Toby Pr

Summary

"One of the more attractive oddities of the United State is that our minorities are so numerous, so huge. A minority of millions is not at all unusual. But there are in fact millions of literate Americans in a state of separation from others of their kind. They are, if you like, the readers of Cheever, a crowd of them too large to be hidden in the wooes. Departments of literature across the country have not succeeded in alienating them from books, works old and new. My friend Keith Botsford and I felt strongly that if the woods were fulled with readers gone astray, among those readers there were probably writers as well. To learn in detail of their existence you have only to publish a magazine like The Republic of Letters. Given encouragement, unknown writers, formerly without hope, materialize. One early reader wrote that our paper, "with its contents so fresh, person-to-person," was "real, non-synthetic, undistracting. "Noting that there were no ads, she asked, "Is it possible, can it last?" and called it "an antidote to the shrinking of the human being in ev