How I Write [1951]

For one so prolific, Russell published little on the process of writing, although his correspondence contains many insights into his compositional and proofreading habits and preferences (see Blackwell 1983, 110–17, 123–31). Aside from 44, he was responsible for only three minor and obscure publications on the subject. In 1925 he commented on his prose style to Josephine K. Piercy, an American academic who later included his letter in her anthology, Modern Writers at Work (see Russell 1930a). In 1928 he offered some pithy advice to aspiring authors in a letter to a University of Illinois student who then published it in the campus newspaper. As a rule of thumb, Russell suggested that “great familiarity with a certain amount of good writing … is better than wide reading”. To this end, he encouraged immersion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English prose and reading Gibbon “all through, at least twice” (1928a). Finally, three years after publication of “How I Write”, Russell (1954b) contributed an even shorter article of the same title (and with much duplication of content) to The Writer. 44 was broadcast (probably live) on 16 January 1951 on As I See It on the BBC’s European Service. It subsequently appeared in print as “Bertrand Russell on ‘How I Write’”, London Calling, no. 607 (10 May 1951): 12 (B&R C51.17), and (five years later) in Portraits from Memory (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956), pp. 194–7 (B&R A102).