In December 1933, in the depths of the Depression, an ad appeared in the Canton Respository offering $10 to 75 needy families. The pseudonymous benefactor, “Mr. B. Virdot,” read the letters the people of Canton, Ohio sent him answering the ad and he sent them the checks ($10 in those days is nearly equivalent to $70 today). Fast forward 80 years and Ted Gup, a reporter, discovers a suitcase full of letters. Gup finds these are the letters sent to “B. Virdot” who in reality was his grandfather. After reading the letters and contacting relatives of the people who wrote the letters, Ted Gup has written a perfect book for the Season of Giving: A Secret Gift: How One Man’s Kindness–and a Trove of Letters–Revealed the Hidden History of the Great Depression. The letters will touch your heart. GRADE: A
Wow! I don’t think I could bear to read it. I hope most of them went on to live a happy life. But with that war bearing down on them next, I doubt it.
THE SECRET GIFT shows how just a few dollars changed people’s lives, Patti. I found the stories very moving.
Sounds interesting. Give me a book of letters and I’m interested. I finally got volume 4 of the complete letters of Henry James from the library – the man knew everybody and he wrote a LOT of letters! This final volume covers 1895-1916.
Henry James was an incredible letter writer, Jeff. But letter writing is a dying art. Saul Bellow knew how to write fine letters, too.
Jeff, I’m not sure if George has heard of that James fellow. 😉
This books sounds interesting, I’ll put it on my library list.
Ha! You know darn well that I’ve read just about everything Henry James ever wrote, Rick! However, I really think James’ style and manner changed in the later books when he dictated them to a stenographer. James seems to have been afflicted by carpel tunnel (except that condition hadn’t been identified yet by the medical community).
The fourth volume of the letters starts just when James hired a woman to take his dictation so I’ll be curious to see if the letters are noticeably different.
There was a radical shift in James’ writing style in his novels when the dictation started, Jeff. I’ll be interested in what you think of those dictated letters.
Wasn’t this the basis for Queen For a Day?
This was on a far smaller scale, Bob. But it apparently helped a lot of people to survive the Great Depression.
Phil did a book on V. F. Calverton, a radical of the twenties and thirties. He wrote many letters just to his wife (who lived in the same house most of the time) every day. All told, he wrote dozens of letters daily. And we complain about tweets.
Letter writing is a lost art, Patti. I can’t remember when I last wrote a letter…maybe in the late 1960s to my girl friend.