Learned whizbangs …

… 'Questioning Minds': Guy Davenport & Hugh Kenner's Letters Book Review | National Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

For 30 years — between roughly 1960 and 1990 — two of the best-read people of the past century regularly exchanged ideas, gossip, drafts of work in progress, commentary on the books they liked and the people they disliked, scholarly discoveries, complaints about publishers, and charming verbal snapshots of their private lives. These 1,800 pages may well represent the last brilliant flowering of paper-based epistolary culture, what early-modern historians punningly refer to as the “republic of letters.”