Letter Writing: The Dying Art

When researching a novel my favorite thing to happen upon is handwritten logs or letters. In the world of the insane asylum, most of the documentation I find is ward reports and annual reports from the asylum's boards. Occasionally I'll find letters written from one medical provider to another regarding a patient's treatment or possibly a typed letter to a family member but rarely do you find anything in a patient's own hand. Though I'm sure there are examples somewhere I never find journals, letters, or postcards though asylum postcards are actually a "thing"-- I have collected a fair number of them over the years but each one was sent on the outside and bear an almost souvenir quality. Never are they sent from patient to family or vice versa.

In today's LitHub digest there was a piece about letters written between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels which author Gavin McCrea read while researching his novel Mrs. Engels. Marx and Engels rarely passed a day without writing to one another, discussing everything from literature to politics. Letter writing holds a marked place in literary history, often exposing parts of an author's personality that a reader might not gather from their published, public works. The letters and journals of greats like Hemingway, Thoreau, Emerson, even Sylvia Plath have garnered as much attention as did their novels, memoirs, and poetry.

So, those few of you who are reading this every day, what has happened to the great art of the handwritten letter? I ask you, do you still enjoy checking your mailbox everyday even when you know nothing awaits but junk mail and the occasional copy of The New Yorker?

Drop me a line one of these days, will you?
xoxo

Poison