Provides a wide-ranging entry point and intervention into scholarship on nineteenth-century American letter-writing This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field--the history of letters and letter writing--is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties. Key Features Draws together different emphases on the intellectual, literary and social uses of letter writing Provides students and researchers with a means to situate letters in their wider theoretical and historical contextsMethodologically expansive, intellectually interrogative chapters based on original research by leading academicsOffers new insights into the lives and careers of Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar Allan Poe, among many others