Letters | Life's Moments

{Note: We felt a little funny about the magazine name Garden & Gun, until we subscribed and discovered delightful stories about Southern lifestyle from literature to sporting culture.}

In the current issue of the award-winning magazine Garden & Gun, author Alice Randall writes an essay about the time a Georgia judge actually stopped the presses on her first novel, The Wind Done Gone—a self-described parody and critique of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.

Throughout the ordeal, Alice received letters from authors petitioning the courts on her behalf, to set her book free. She was dazzled by letters from Toni Morrison, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and more. But it was a particular letter from Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird that was most remarkable, because Harper Lee's novel was about the very things that Alice Randall was up against—race, redemption, and righteousness.

Alice writes about Harper Lee, "I was struck by the Southernness of the letter. The mix of fine manners and politics, classical allusions and familial references, was true Dixie." She goes on to say, "I will always be in her debt. Not because she wrote to the court and then exchanged six letters with me over a decade. Before she knew of my existence, I knew of hers. Her words made me braver than I might have been from near to my very beginning."

You can read more of Alice Randall's essay here.

We celebrate letters in every way. Whether for love, for support, for death, for birth—our letters are treasured because they honor some of life's most important moments.