Henry James was a great culmination. The pontifical, magnificent language he created, with its multiplicities and rococo qualifications, is an extension of the elaborate courtesies of the New England aristocracy in which he grew up, but no one else ever spoke or wrote as he did. The cadences are his alone. His own brother, the philosopher William James, confessed that when confronted with The Wings of the Dove, he read [...]

"I've the feeling no author was ever better served," wrote Samuel Beckett in September 1961 to Alan Schneider, who had just directed the first American production of Happy Days. It is a feeling compliment, and these letters bear out Schneider's long, painstaking devotion to Beckett as a playwright and love of him as a man.

Generosity was doubtless the motive when the editor of this exchange of letters pared the [...]