It is certain that from her teens Louisa May Alcott had to earn money to help support her family but she had always written stories and kept a journal, so the drive to write must have come first. Quoted in the The Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography is the story that when looking through Emerson's library as a girl and coming across Goethe's 'Correspondence with a Child", she began to write letters to Emerson. She didn't give them to him but years later confessed to him, and to his amusement, of her youthful adoration. She wrote that he did more for her " - as for many another - than he knew, by the simple beauty of his life, the truth and wisdom of his books, the example of a great, good man."
Tonight, the day after Obama received his Nobel Peace prize, Mark Lawson on Radio 4's Front Row was talking about playwright Harold Pinter, conscientious objector and political activist, and recipient of the 2005 Nobel Literature prize who died almost exactly a year ago. Just discovered amongst his library of 2,000 books is a novel by Samuel Beckett which Pinter 'liberated' from a library in 1950 because he found it so moving he couldn't part with it. Beckett became a major influence on Pinter's work and the two men sent each other drafts of the manuscripts of the plays they were working on for comments. Prolific letter writers, they corresponded with each other regularly, 'perceptively and affectionately' according to Pinter's archivist - and sometimes about their shared passion for cricket!
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