Epistolary Practices

Letters have long been read as primary sources for biography and<br/>history but their performative fictive and textual dimensions<br/>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<br/>postmodern period.<br/>After offering an overview of the genre Decker explores epistolary practices that coincide with American experiences of<br/>space settlement separation and reunion. He discusses letters<br/>written by such well-known and well-educated persons as John<br/>Winthrop Benjamin Franklin Thomas Jefferson Abigail and John<br/>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.