ART OF LETTER WRITING

You are to be commended for giving generous space to the question of letter writing! Kenneth Zimmerman certainly holds his own, and I, for one, hope that ultimately some recognition will be given to letter-writing as a respectable genre of its own.

And why not? After all, we had as a best-seller a novel composed entirely of letters: Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey’s “A Woman of Independent Means.” A. R. Gurney’s delightful play, “Love Letters,” which opened last year, has been extended for an indefinite run with impressive casts reading letters back and forth to each other.

Freud certainly was an eminent letter writer, as was Lord Byron. In fact, Harvard scholar John Livingston Lowes felt that Byron’s letters were crucial to an understanding of his literary output.

Letters are a personal form of communication and as long as Times readers write, they are exercising their right to be concerned about the workings of democracy.

SHERRY TERZIAN, LOS ANGELES