Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications

Letters have long been read as primary sources for biography and history, but their performative, fictive, and textual dimensions have only recently attracted serious notice. In this book, William Merrill Decker examines the place of the personal letter in American popular and literary culture from the colonial to the postmodern period. After offering an overview of the genre, Decker explores epistolary practices that coincide with American experiences of space, settlement, separation, and reunion. He discusses letters written by such well-known and well-educated persons as John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Clemens, Henry James, and Alice James, but also letters by persons who, except in their correspondence, were not writers at all: indentured servants, New England factory workers, slaves, soldiers, and Western pioneers. Individual chapters explore the letter writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Adams -- three of America's most ambitious, accomplished, and theoretically astute letter writers. Finally, Decker considers the ongoing transformation of letter writing in the electronic age.

About the Author :
William Merrill Decker, author of The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams, is director of undergraduate programs in English at Oklahoma State University.

Review :
"Epistolary Practices presents, for the first time, a detailed study of letter writing in nineteenth-century America. Decker not only helps us to understand this literary genre, but his discussions of Emerson, Dickinson, and Adams as practitioners of it allow us to see these writers as masters of the craft. This is a valuable book for anyone interested in nineteenth-century writing styles." -- Joel Myerson, editor of The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson "[Decker] examines with insight and wit the role of letter writing and what it reveals about human relations. . . . An understandable and nearly jargon-free study." -- CHOICE "One measure of a book's worth is the number of interesting questions it provokes. Add to that carefully researched historical information, sensitive and thought-provoking discussions of literary figures, new insights into the ubiquitous letter form, all presented in elegant prose, and Epistolary Practices must be judged a stunning success." -- Prose Studies "William Decker's Epistolary Practices is the first critical work to address the place of the letter -- arguably the most widely practiced of literary forms -- within American culture. Decker's rich and thoughtful analysis sets the standard for discussions to come, not only about letter writing but, also, about language as an instrument of human need and human community." -- Joanne Jacobson, author of Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams