LETTERS: An Old Time Epistolary Novel by Seven Fictitious Drolls & Dreamers, Each of Which Imagines Himself Actual was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1979, and it is Barth’s most monumental (and most controversial) work — an 800-page epistolary novel in which characters from all of his previous novels exchange letters with each other and with a character called “the Author” (who is writing a novel called LETTERS).
The correspondents include Todd Andrews (from The Floating Opera), Jacob Horner (from The End of the Road), descendants of characters from The Sot-Weed Factor, and several new characters. Their letters, which span the period from 1812 to 1969, weave together personal narratives, American history (the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Vietnam era), and metafictional commentary on the nature of the novel itself.
The book divides readers absolutely. Its admirers see it as Barth’s masterpiece — a novel that synthesizes everything he had done before into a single, impossibly ambitious work that justifies the postmodern novel’s claim to seriousness. Its detractors see it as the reductio ad absurdum of metafiction — a novel so self-involved that it loses contact with human experience entirely. Both positions are defensible; the book exists at the extreme edge of what prose fiction can attempt.
Collecting LETTERS
First edition (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1979): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Without jacket: $5–$15