I have been reading a good number of biographies this year which I am sure you will commend. Probably you remember how I picked up that volume of Ludwig’s Napoleon on the boat and liked it so well that the owner had to ask me for it. I tried to get it at the library but it was out. Instead I got a life of the Kaiser Wilhelm by the same author. Since then I hve read several others of celebrated literary personages. I have one at home now about Shelley, whose poetry I am studying at school. His life is very interesting. He seems to have been the wild, passionate and dissolute type of genius: which makes him very entertaining to read about.
— Tennessee Williams, letter to his grandfather, Nov. 22, 1928
“My custom is to undress and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus…”
Oh, is it, Percy? Is that your custom, hon? I mean, HONESTLY. Love it. His letters are incredible!! …and the nights are for ever serene, and we see a star in the east at sunset–I think it is Jupiter–almost as…