A psychological romance of two people who return to their childhood home to understand and recover from their neuroses.

With her outsize personality, Julia Child is known around the world by her first name alone. But despite that familiarity, how much do we really know of the inner Julia? Now more than 200 letters exchanged between Julia and Avis DeVoto, her friend and unofficial literary agent memorably introduced in the hit movie Julie & Julia, open the window on Julia’s deepest thoughts and feelings. This riveting correspondence, in print for the first time, chronicles the blossoming of a unique and lifelong friendship between the two women and the turbulent process of Julia’s creation of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, one of the most influential cookbooks ever written. Frank, bawdy, funny, exuberant, and occasionally agonized, these letters show Julia, first as a new bride in Paris, then becoming increasingly worldly and adventuresome as she follows her diplomat husband in his postings to Nice, Germany, and Norway. With commentary by the noted food historian Joan Reardon, and covering topics as diverse as the lack of good wine in the United States, McCarthyism, and sexual mores, these astonishing letters show America on the verge of political, social, and gastronomic transformation.

Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955) was a historian, critic, editor, professor, political commentator, and conservationist, and above all a writer of comprehensive skill. As a contributor for more than thirty years to Harper's and other magazines, he was known for his forceful opinions. His essays were often brash and opinionated and kept him in the public limelight. One stinging essay even led the FBI to create a file on him. His five serious novels are forgotten today, but his magazine short stories and the well-paid potboilers that he wrote under a pseudonym (John August) subsidized the first of the significant works of American history that brought DeVoto lasting fame. Four of his historical works, all still in print, are The Year of Decision: 1846, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1943; Across the Wide Missouri, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1948; 1953 National Book Award-winning The Course of Empire; and his popular abridged edition of the Journals of Lewis and Clark, which also appeared in 1953. A busy man with a busy life, DeVoto found time to write and answer letters in abundance. In 1933 he received a fan letter from Katharine Sterne, a young woman hospitalized with tuberculosis; his reply touched off an extraordinary eleven-year correspondence. Sterne had graduated with honors from Wellesley College in 1928 and had served as an assistant art critic at the New York Times before her illness. Despite her enforced invalidism she maintained an active intellectual life. Sterne and DeVoto wrote to each other until her death in 1944, sometimes in many pages and as often as twice a week, exchanging opinions about life, literature, art, current events, family news, gossip, and their innermost feelings. DeVoto's biographer, Wallace Stegner, states that in these letters DeVoto "expressed himself more intimately than in any other writings." Although their correspondence amounted to more than 868 letters (and is virtually complete on both sides), DeVoto and Sterne never met, both of them doubtless realizing that physical remoteness permitted a psychological proximity that was deeply nourishing. This volume contains 140 of their letters. They have been selected by DeVoto's son Mark, who has also provided detailed notes clarifying ambiguities and obscure references. Readers will enjoy these letters for their wit and literary flair, but they will also gain insight into the cultural and historical crosscurrents of the 1930s and '40s while taking an intimate and engaging look at a friendship forged entirely through words.

Bernard DeVoto was a wild intellectual from the Rocky Mountains, a rebel, iconoclast, and idealist who fled his stifling small town for the intellectual freedom and community of Harvard. While he settled eastward in his career as a novelist, professor, editor, historian, and critic, he continued to love, to a point of passion, western openness, freedom, and society. National Book Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning author and fellow westerner Wallace Stegner's life intersected with Devoto's many times, first by accident and later by friendship and example. They were kindred spirits, both westerners by birth, upbringing, and demeanor, novelists by vocation, teachers by necessity, and historians and conservationists by a sheer compulsion inspired by the region that shaped them.

“This book is the fascinating record of DeVoto’s crusade to save the West from itself. . . . His arguments, insights, and passion are as relevant and urgent today as they were when he first put them on paper.”—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., from the Foreword Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955) was, according to the novelist Wallace Stegner, “a fighter for public causes, for conservation of our natural resources, for freedom of the press and freedom of thought.” A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, DeVoto is best remembered for his trilogy, The Year of Decision: 1846, Across the Wide Missouri, and The Course of Empire. He also wrote a column for Harper’s Magazine, in which he fulminated about his many concerns, particularly the exploitation and destruction of the American West. This volume brings together ten of DeVoto’s acerbic and still timely essays on Western conservation issues, along with his unfinished conservationist manifesto, Western Paradox, which has never before been published. The book also includes a foreword by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who was a student of DeVoto’s at Harvard University, and a substantial introduction by Douglas Brinkley and Patricia Limerick, both of which shed light on DeVoto’s work and legacy.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Creator sat upon the throne, thinking. Behind him stretched the illimitable continent of heaven, steeped in a glory of light and color; before him rose the black night of Space, like a wall. His mighty bulk towered rugged and mountain-like into the zenith, and His divine head blazed there like a distant sun. At His feet stood three colossal figures, diminished to extinction, almost, by contrast -- archangels -- their heads level with His ankle-bone. When the Creator had finished thinking, He said, "I have thought. Behold!" He lifted His hand, and from it burst a fountain-spray of fire, a million stupendous suns, which clove the blackness and soared, away and away and away, diminishing in magnitude and intensity as they pierced the far frontiers of Space, until at last they were but as diamond nailheads sparkling under the domed vast roof of the universe. At the end of an hour the Grand Council was dismissed. They left the Presence impressed and thoughtful, and retired to a private place, where they might talk with freedom. None of the three seemed to want to begin, though all wanted somebody to do it.