Correspondence with people of note

Back in the olden days, people wrote letters to each other. We didn’t tweet, we didn’t email. We actually sat down and wrote letters. One of my more pleasant memories in this area was a rather extended correspondence I once had with Spider Robinson over some points raised in some of his stories. We exchanged letters for about a year or so. Good times.

So, have you ever gotten a real, honest-to-Og letter from someone of note? Not a form letter or a mass-mailing, but a real letter? Tell me about it.

She does not post here any longer, but if I recall this correctly, our friend Eve regularly corresponded with Olivia de Haviland

Nothing personal but until you get some feedback from Dopers you can browse http://www.lettersofnote.com/ to read letters sent by famous people.

Some of them are pretty mundane but some are very interesting. I particularly like this one. It’s the speech that would have been read out by Nixon if Armstrong and Aldrin became stranded on the moon.

I like Private Kurt Vonnegut’s letter home, from the same site.

Thanks, mittu, for that link. My gosh, there is so much on there! I did a search by decade of the 1960s, and the first thing up were letters from John, Ringo and George to Paul’s agent/lawyer Lee Eastman, in 1969. Very interesting - especially taking into consideration that the word was that Yoko Ono was responsible for the Beatle’s breakup–if you read those letters, it puts that theory in a whole new light.

More interesting, though, were the letters to Jackie Kennedy after the assassination of President Kennedy. One in particular was from a young boy in Dallas whose father, a soldier, had been killed a few months earlier. In the comments section there was a link to a PBS site, an interview with a historian who recently put out a book on the letters to Jackie. She tried to get in touch with as many of the writers as she could, and was able to get in touch with his two children. It’s very moving.

At any rate, thank you for the link - that one is definitely going into my bookmarks.

I sent things to Dave Barry and Martin Gardner and got back brief scribbled notes in reply. Not much, but not a form letter or a standardized reply, at least.
I’ve exchanged e-mails with notable folks in my field, but I doubt if anyone outside the field would know of them, or care.

OK, not a star of any sort, but I had a correspondence of a few letters with a former member of ‘Our Gang.’

I sent a letter to Raymond Smullyan. I got a letter back in maybe four days; he included a copy of his biography. Very courteous.

He also gave me his phone number. I called him, but he didn’t seem much interested in chatting with me. There was a lot of awkward silence. I was hoping, perhaps self-importantly, that he would be interested in talking to me because I had been a huge fan of his since the seventh grade.

I still admire the hell out of him, though.

Wow. I wasn’t expecting much but that speech is pretty moving (and they didn’t even die!).

Not me, but a friend of mine:
Friend had been reading MFK Fisher’s writing and impulsively dropped her a line. The dear girl wrote back and they maintained a short correspondence. Not too shortly thereafter, she died.

I emailed Fred (aka “Mr.”) Rogers a happy birthday email note of fandom and longtime adoration via the PBS website long, long ago. That nice gentleman in the sweater actually replied. I know, it could have been a staffer/intern, but the voice was so distinctly his that I like to believe that he took the time to answer…I can’t imagine he’d condone imposter replies to fanmail. “Won’t you be my ghostwriter?” Puhleaze.