A Life in Letters: Personal Essays

Abstract

By formatting my dissertation as a series of letters to famous writers, artists, and musicians, I have attempted to establish an intimate, detailed connection between my life story and the words of the artists I am addressing. At the same time, I aimed to stray from their stories and see where my own musings about their lives would take me, to what parts of the past and not-so-distant past their words could transport me. While the dissertaion I have written is essayistic in nature, a case could be made that it is a kind of memoir, because of its somewhat autobiographical arc, its episodic reflections that hinge on traditional literary forms. As for forms, I turned to the letter as my medium for conveying past experience, because I wished to enter into a conversation with sages and fools of old. Dialogue, then, became a key component of these personal essays. My goal was to make the art of letter writing new again, to draw on the rich tradition of correspondence ranging from Pauline letters to Seneca's letter to his wife, and the host of letters borne of the lives of great artists like Jane Austen, Ezra Pound, John Keats, and many others.