Selections from the Correspondence of Edward Sapir with Ruth Benedict 1923—1938

These letters are a very small selection from the voluminous correspondence which Edward Sapir carried on with Ruth Benedict, mainly in the early years of their friendship. None of her letters survive, but the poems she sent him and his responses to them provide a sense of her side of the exchange. Almost all of Sapir’s letters were written by hand, in a fine, precise script as if for publication, and when she once typed a letter to him he protested, “Use the typewriter for scientific MS but not for correspondence, please! Things don’t look right in type.”