letters, in literature, written messages, ranging from those addressed to the public and those sent from lover to lover, to business letters and thank-you notes. The common quality they share is a lively style, echoing the personality of the sender yet aimed at the mind and heart of the receiver. Their intimacy gives them an immediacy that touches general readers as well. Long, eloquent letters, or epistles, were the favored means of communication in the ancient world. Those of Cicero and Horace, ranging in subject from political philosophy to literary criticism and social satire, served as models for the formal statement or manifesto. Although the epistles of Saint Paul and Saint Jerome are concerned with the Christian life of the spirit, they are patterned upon classical models. The writings of Cicero and Horace served as models once again for a revival of the epistle in the 18th cent., when John Dryden and Alexander Pope composed verse epistles and Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. Two famous sets of letters vividly portray life in the Middle Ages. The passionate correspondence of Peter Abelard and his mistress, Héloise, poignantly suggests the cruelty of the supposedly civilized church in 12th-century France; the Paston Letters reveal in detail the daily life of an English family in the 15th cent. The 18th cent. was a golden age of letters. Madame de Sévigné, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Lord Chesterfield all entered into long, highly polished, and extremely readable correspondences with their respective children. Letter writing was so popular in England at this time that Samuel Richardson capitalized on the vogue by writing the first epistolary novels, Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48). Each was meant to serve as a guide for writing different kinds of letters as well as for designating correct female behavior under trying circumstances. Among British writers of the 19th cent., the best correspondents included John Keats, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and R. L. Stevenson. George Bernard Shaw wrote love letters to the actress Ellen Terry for three years before they met. Their eventual encounter was not a success, but the correspondence continued for 23 years. The particular ability of letters to convey with immediacy not only the emotions and tragedies of a past time but also the substance of daily life is well illustrated in The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (1972, ed. by Robert Myers), a collection of letters written by a Georgia family between 1854 and 1868. Important to students of American literature are the letters of the editor Maxwell Perkins to such writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Thomas Wolfe. Also illuminating, partly because of their very existence, are the letters of Groucho Marx to T. S. Eliot.

Paston Letters, collection of personal and business correspondence, mostly among members of the Paston family of Norfolk, England. The letters cover the years from 1422 to 1529, together with deeds and other documents. The family was at that time actively acquiring land and properties in the area, some of it by questionable means, including the estates of Sir John Fastolf. The collection forms an indispensable source for the history, manners, morals, habits, customs, and moneys of the people of England at the close of the Middle Ages. A portion of the letters was published by James Fenn in 1787 and 1789, but the original manuscripts disappeared and doubt of their authenticity grew. However, they were rediscovered after 1865, with additional material. A definitive edition was edited by James Gairdner (1904), and a volume of selections edited with an introduction by Norman Davis was published in 1958.

National Institute of Arts and Letters: see American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Casket Letters: see Mary Queen of Scots.

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, honorary academy of notable American artists, writers, and composers. The National Institute of Arts and Letters, founded in 1898, served as the parent body for the American Academy of Arts and Letters, founded in 1904, until the two were amalgamated in 1976. Membership is limited to 250 native or naturalized U.S. citizens, of which 50 are elected to the Academy for notable achievements in art, literature, or music. The Academy-Institute also has an honorary membership of 75 foreign artists, writers, and composers to strengthen cultural ties with other countries. The Academy-Institute offers a number of prizes annually, including the Brunner Memorial Award in Architecture and the Gold Medal for excellence in the arts. The members of the Academy confer the Howells Medal, given every five years for a work of American fiction, and the Award of Merit Medal, given in five categories of the arts to a person not affiliated with the Academy. Located in New York City, it maintains a museum and a library (23,000 volumes), and holds exhibitions of works of art, manuscripts, books, and scores. It also purchases paintings by American artists for distribution to museums.