The journal Lapham’s Quarterly recently created a nifty chart called “Friends, Lovers, and Family” that traces the connections between notable writers, artists, actors, etc. It’s mostly writers, really, which makes it a sort of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” for the literary set — except that, in a wonderfully sly move, Kevin Bacon is actually in the bottom right corner. Here’s an interesting chain of connections: Walt Whitman was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a friend of Margaret Fuller, whose grandnephew was Buckminster Fuller, who was a friend of Edmund Bacon, who was the father of Kevin Bacon. Maybe the party game is true after all…
If you’d prefer to learn about such luminaries in their own words, the blog Letters of Note is a treasure trove. Editor Shaun Usher posts a new letter that he deems interesting and/or important each weekday, including a transcription and, where necessary, a translation. This month alone brings letters from Jack Kerouac, Steve Martin, John Lennon, Richard Feynman, John Candy, Gene Roddenberry, Walt Disney, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, President Eisenhower, and Adolph Hitler. My favorite of this month’s letters, though, is from someone not at all famous: a prison official writing back to the mother of jailed civil rights activist Joan Trumpauer Mulholland (pictured right, seated, with her head turned). He chides her thusly:
I notice that you state that as a mother of a minor that you want to be notified in case of any emergency. What I cannot understand is why as a mother you permitted a minor white girl to gang up with a bunch of negro bucks and white hoodlums to ramble over this country with the express purpose of violating the laws of certain states and attempting to incite acts of violence.
That particular letter was initially posted on Hunter Gray’s website (he is also in the photo, seated, left).
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