Letters of Note
The following letter was written exactly 100 years ago. It’s a remarkable piece of writing that never fails to move me. And because you deserve it, above the transcript I’ve included audio of the letter being read by the lovely Juliet Stevenson, taken from the Letters of Note: Music audiobook. Born in Alabama in 1880, Helen Keller
On this day in 1876, shortly after making history, Alexander Graham Bell wrote the following letter to his father. To read his diary entry from that same day, visit Diaries of Note. And don’t forget to sign up for the Letters of Note newsletter. Born in Scotland in 1847, Alexander Graham Bell hailed from a
Dear all, On 1st January of this year, after what feels like centuries of preparation, I launched Diaries of Note, and though incredibly difficult to plan, the premise is simple: every single day, on the Diaries of Note website, I am featuring a single diary entry from history, published on the same day and month
Although they only existed for seven years and released just three albums, Nirvana were a band of immeasurable influence in the music world thanks in no small part to Smells Like Teen Spirit, a single track on Nevermind, their second album. It was this song that brought them out into the open, going on to sell millions
Born in Cambridge in 1952, Douglas Adams was best known for creating The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a wildly successful project that began in 1978 as a science-fiction comedy radio series and eventually evolved to become something much larger, in many formats and in many languages, adored by many millions of people around the world.
Born in the Czech Republic in 1904, Vilma Grünwald was 39 years old when she wrote a final letter to her husband, Kurt. They had been held at Auschwitz with their two sons for 7 months, separated for much of their ordeal following a stint in a “family camp” that was soon dismantled by the
In December of 1984, 13-year-old Ryan White was given 6 months to live after contracting AIDS during a contaminated treatment for hemophilia, a blood condition with which he had lived since birth. By June of 1985, keen to resume as normal a lifestyle as possible, Ryan attempted to return to school; however, due to ignorance
When he wrote this letter to his mother in 1944, Roald Dahl was working at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.—one of hundreds of undercover agents employed by Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service to spy on the United States. Dahl’s debut novel, The Gremlins, had been published the year before, and it would be another
Uhuru Houston was born in Brooklyn in 1969. He joined the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department in 1993, and three years later married Sonya, whom he had met when they were both students at Norfolk State University. In 1999, he was assigned to the World Trade Center. On the morning
In July of 1938, American novelist Thomas Wolfe was struck down with pneumonia and taken to hospital. He was soon diagnosed as having tuberculosis of the brain, from which he would never recover. Wolfe died on 15th September, aged just 37. A month before his death, as he lay in hospital, Wolfe wrote to his
On 19 March 2018, almost five years after being diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, thirty-eight-year-old Julie Yip-Williams died, leaving behind a husband and two daughters. Her early years had been anything but easy. Born blind in Vietnam, at two months of age she was almost euthanised on the orders of a grandmother who deemed
Few people have fought harder for the plight of African-Americans than Martin Luther King Jr., a minister and activist who spent most of his all-too-brief life leading the civil rights movement only to be stopped by a bullet in Memphis in 1968. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on 15 January 1929, as Michael King
It was when she joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927 that Frida Kahlo first met Diego Rivera, a fellow artist 21 years Kahlo’s senior who soon became her mentor and husband. Kahlo’s life up until then had been a struggle due to polio as a child and a serious traffic accident as a young
Author Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, and to this day remains one of the greats in the world of crime fiction thanks to his creation of Philip Marlowe, the hardboiled detective who stars in many of his stories: The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady
Dear all, It gives me untold amounts of pleasure to announce that the Letters of Note website has been given its first facelift since I naively launched it in 2009 using a bog-standard Blogger template. I would like to thank, profusely but from a very safe distance, the patient team of wizards over at Automattic
On September 12th of 2011, the New York Times published an article by Dr. Abigail Zuger in which she criticised certain supposedly unrealistic aspects of Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s recently released and widely lauded thriller in which a deadly pandemic sweeps the globe. In response, a week later the following letter reached the newspaper, penned by the movie’s screenwriter, Scott Burns, and
On September 29th, 1918, months before the end of World War I, a freshly assigned physician at Camp Devens military base in Massachusetts wrote the following letter to a friend and fellow doctor, and described a terrifying influenza epidemic that was now killing hundreds of his camp’s soldiers each day. The death toll in this
On April 18th of 1961, it was announced that iconic Hollywood star Gary Cooper was dying of cancer after a glittering 36 year career that saw him amass countless fans, plaudits, and awards across the globe. Weeks after that news broke, and just days before he died, Cooper received the following fan letter from Kirk Douglas,
On October 31st, 1918, as the First World War neared its end, celebrated war poet and officer of the Second Manchesters Wilfred Owen wrote home to his mother. Sadly, this would be his last letter. Four days later–exactly a century ago–Owen was shot dead as he led his company across the Sambre–Oise Canal. His mother
In the early hours of July 21st, 1969, shortly after the Apollo Lunar Module landed on its surface, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to step foot on the Moon. 28 years later, Buzz wrote a letter to Barry Goldman, a professor at the University of Maryland. Transcript follows. (Many thanks to
Few filmmakers have made more of an impression than Federico Fellini, the Italian maestro whose award-laden, four decade career peaked, in the eyes of most, with La Dolce Vita, his 1960 epic which charts seven days in the life of Italian journalist Marcello Mastroianni in postwar Rome. After Fellini’s death in October of 1993, tens
In December of 1886, the chairman of London Hospital, Francis Carr-Gomm, wrote to The Times newspaper and told of a disfigured 27-year-old man whose appearance was so “terrible” that he was reduced to living in a small, isolated attic room at the hospital, hidden from view. Carr-Gomm was in fact describing Joseph Merrick—”The Elephant Man”—a
Florence Nightingale’s influence in the world of nursing is impossible to quantify. Born in 1820 to a wealthy family, she knew from a young age that caring for the sick and vulnerable was her calling in life, much to the disapproval of her parents. Little did they know, but their daughter would one day become
Sitting behind a sheet of glass at the British Museum in London, inscribed on a clay tablet in an ancient script known as cuneiform, is solid proof of two things: firstly, that poor customer service–an affliction that somehow feels like a modern phenomenon–has actually been a plague on societies for at least 3775 long years,
In 2013, a then-9-year-old boy named Joshua wrote to his hero, Alan Moore, the genius responsible for writing such classics as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Joshua’s father recently told me by email: “Whilst my sons were at primary school they both did an exercise in English where they wrote letters
In 1670, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, granddaughter of Henry IV, stunned the masses by falling in love not with a king but with Antoine Nompar de Caumont, duc de Lauzun, a relatively lowly member of society known widely for his “unique” looks. One person who found the news particularly amusing was Madame de Sévigné, who
In 1887, American lawyer and famed orator Robert G. Ingersoll sent to his future son-in-law, Walston, a bottle of the finest whiskey and a letter, reprinted below, in which he poetically sang its praises. The alcohol was enjoyed, but not as much as the letter, which was so loved that it soon circulated amongst family,
Born 200 years ago today, Charlotte Brontë was the eldest of the Brontë sisters, three siblings whose novels–Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Halls, to name but three–are now considered classics. In 1848, Emily died from tuberculosis; she was just 30 years old. A few days after her death, Charlotte
One would imagine that Eric Idle, one-sixth of beloved comedy troupe Monty Python, and John Major, Prime Minister of the UK from 1990 to 1996, have nothing in common – but you would be wrong, for both Idle and Major were born on the same day: March 29th, 1943. In 1993, as their 50th birthdays
According to the great Stephen Hawking, Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei was, more than any other person, “responsible for the birth of modern science.” In 1609, having seen details of a very early telescope that had been constructed in the Netherlands, Galileo designed and built his own, superior version that boasted far better magnification,
Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals of his generation, was known by most as the founder of analytic philosophy, but he was actually a man of many talents: a pioneering mathematician, an accomplished logician, a tireless activist, a respected historian, and a Nobel Prize-winning writer, to name but a handful. When he wrote this
Since her death in 1817, Jane Austen’s anonymously penned novels – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, to name but three – have become required reading in many circles and are now held aloft as classics. She was also a prolific and observant writer of frank letters that rarely failed to entertain; however,
Few authors have made an impact as enduring as literary icon Samuel Clemens, a man who, under his pen name, Mark Twain, wrote such classics as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book which has been read by many millions of people around the world since its publication in 1884. It was ten years earlier, whilst
In 1976, shortly after a coup that saw the President of Argentina, Isabel Martínez de Perón, replaced by a military dictatorship, the life of celebrated Argentine poet Juan Gelman darkened immeasurably when his son and daughter-in-law—Marcelo, 20, and Maria Claudia, an 18-year-old expectant mother—were kidnapped, just two of approximately 30,000 people to go missing in
Remington Steele the parakeet is prepared for surgery at the Animal Medical Center, NYC. The dreaded rejection letter is, more often than not, an entirely miserable experience for all concerned. To receive one is to instantly and all at once have one’s hopes dashed, confidence thinned, and mood dampened; to send the same is to
In 1987, multi-award winning author Ursula K. Le Guin was asked to supply a blurb for Synergy: New Science Fiction, Volume 1, the first in a new four-part series of anthologies edited by George Zebrowski which intended to showcase science fiction stories from authors both established and up-and-coming. For Ursula K. Le Guin, however, the
Above: Elizabth Smart, c.1930 Elizabeth Smart was in her 20s when she first met and fell for fellow poet George Barker; despite his already being married, by 1941 she was pregnant with the first of their four children. Smart and Barker’s unorthodox relationship was a famously rocky affair due in no small part to their
Above: British and German troops meet during the truce On Christmas Eve of 1914, five months into World War I, something amazing happened: thousands of British and German troops on the Western Front decided to put down their weapons, rise from the trenches, and greet each other peacefully. In fact, for the next few days,
It wasn’t until the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act in 1928 that women in the UK were finally given the same voting rights as men. Campaigners had been pushing for such a development for decades, however, progress had been far too slow for some. In 1903, a small group of frustrated activists, headed
In September of 1884, San Francisco residents Joseph and Mary Tape did something seemingly quite ordinary: they attempted to enroll their 8-year-old daughter, Mamie, at Spring Valley School, a local school also to be attended by Mamie’s friends. However, this was 1884, and although born in the U.S., Mamie was of Chinese descent and the
On March 19th of 1953, weeks before it was announced to the public, scientist Francis Crick excitedly wrote a letter to his son and told him of one of the most important scientific developments of modern times: his co-discovery of the “beautiful” structure of DNA, the molecule responsible for carrying the genetic instructions of living
In 1960, pioneering American artists Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse met for the first time and instantly clicked, quickly forming a strong, deep bond that would last for ten years and result in countless inspirational discussions and rich exchanges of ideas. Indeed, they remained incredibly close friends until May of 1970, at which point Hesse,
In December of 1882, while visiting Paris, distinguished psychologist William James received word that his father‘s ill-health had further deteriorated at the family home in the US. Almost immediately he travelled to England in a bid to return home, only to find that his brother, Henry, had already left his London home for New York.
For two months in 1974, as Richard Burton filmed his part in The Klansman, he and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, moved to California with Cassius, just one of Taylor’s many beloved cats. Sadly, the trip confused Cassius somewhat and he soon went missing, never to return. Taylor wrote the following letter some time after his disappearance.
“Messrs Jeffrey Benson and Michael Isaacs of Tracing Services Ltd, currently on bail on charges of conspiracy to create a public mischief, appear to have lost most of the work collecting debts and tracing absconders for the Granada group, to the considerable regret of Mr James Arkell, Granada’s retail credit manager. Ever since last June,
In the 1820s, having grown up on her father’s plantation amongst dozens of slaves — many of whom she had befriended and educated — Sarah Grimké began to tour the Northern United States giving anti-slavery lectures to all who would listen. She was joined by her sister some years later, by which time the talks also covered
In the 1840s, shortly after reading Alfred Tennyson‘s poem, “The Vision of Sin,” mathematician and “father of the computer,” Charles Babbage, wrote the following letter to the poet and suggested an alteration in the name of accuracy. For a modern day equivalent, see Simon Singh’s take on Katie Melua’s song, Nine Million Bicycles. (Source: The
In the early 1480s, many years before he painted the world-famous pieces for which he is now best known—the Mona Lisa being just one—Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci sought a job at the court of Ludovico Sforza, the then de facto ruler of Milan. Fully aware that Sforza was looking to employ military engineers, Leonardo
Early-1932, after seeing a photograph in the New York Times of the great Helen Keller at the top of the newly-opened Empire State Building, Dr. John Finley wrote to her and asked what she really “saw” from that height. Keller — famously both deaf and blind from a very early age — responded with the incredible
In October of 1819, 23-year-old schoolteacher Lucy Thurston and her husband, Asa, left their home in Massachusetts to become members of the first expedition of Christian missionaries to the Hawaiian Islands. Their efforts were welcomed, and for the rest of their lives they educated the locals, helped to build schools and churches, and even translated
In November of 1964, fearful of his connection to the Communist Party through Stanley Levison, the FBI anonymously sent Martin Luther King the following threatening letter, along with a cassette that contained allegedly incriminating audio recordings of King with women in various hotel rooms — the fruits of a 9 month surveillance project headed by William
Dear All, In a move which thankfully won’t affect the vast majority of you, I have today disabled comments on Letters of Note. Permanently. All complaints should be directed towards a section of society to whom the concept of even vaguely civil discussion means nothing. This collective waste of flesh, bone, and dangerously limited brain
Alcock & Brown shortly after takeoff | Image: Wikimedia On June 14th of 1919 at St. John’s, Newfoundland, Captain John Alcock and his navigator Lt. Arthur Brown made history as they began what would become the world’s first non-stop transatlantic flight. For their troubles they were awarded £10,000 by the Daily Mail, a newspaper then-renowned
Now widely considered one of the greatest books of poetry ever written, Leaves of Grass was first published in 1855 and financed entirely by its author, Walt Whitman. Whitman – then an aspiring, unknown poet – immediately sent one of the 795 copies to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a highly respected man who, a decade previous, had
On July 18 of 1969, as the world waited anxiously for Apollo 11 to land safely on the surface of the Moon, speechwriter William Safire imagined the worst case scenario as he expertly wrote the following sombre memo to President Nixon‘s Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman. Its contents: a contingency plan, in the form of a speech
The following remarkable letter was written on clay tablet between the years of 1350 and 1335, BC, by Ayyab – king of the city of Aštartu in the Canaan region – and sent to Amenhotep IV, then-Pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. It was discovered in the 1880s in Amarna, and is just one of 382 such Cuneiform