The following letter was written exactly 100 years ago. It’s a remarkable piece of writing that never fails to move me. And because you deserve it, above the transcript I’ve included audio of the letter being read by the lovely Juliet Stevenson, taken from the Letters of Note: Music audiobook. Born in Alabama in 1880, Helen Keller was yet to reach two years of age when she lost her eyesight and hearing due to an illness. Despite such a challenging start to life, she went on to do incredible things. By the age of twenty-three, having already achieved so much, her autobiography, T ..read more

Uhuru Houston was born in Brooklyn in 1969. He joined the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department in 1993, and three years later married Sonya, whom he had met when they were both students at Norfolk State University. In 1999, he was assigned to the World Trade Center. On the morning of 11 September 2001, Uhuru Houston was one of seventy-two officers to die when terrorists hijacked four planes and flew them into the Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon building in Virginia, and a field in Pennsylvania. He left behind Sonya and their two children, Hasani and Hannah. A ..read more

On 19 March 2018, almost five years after being diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, thirty-eight-year-old Julie Yip-Williams died, leaving behind a husband and two daughters. Her early years had been anything but easy. Born blind in Vietnam, at two months of age she was almost euthanised on the orders of a grandmother who deemed her to be defective; years later, as an older child, she sailed to Hong Kong with her family and hundreds of other refugees in search of a more peaceful life, eventually settling down in the US where her life improved drastically. She was soon given partial sight by ..read more

On this day in 1876, shortly after making history, Alexander Graham Bell wrote the following letter to his father. To read his diary entry from that same day, visit Diaries of Note. And don’t forget to sign up for the Letters of Note newsletter. Born in Scotland in 1847, Alexander Graham Bell hailed from a family of scientists and inventors, with his father, grandfather, and brother all having worked in the field of speech and hearing. The direction of Bell’s own work was also influenced by his wife’s deafness and that of his mother, whose hearing began to fade when he was only 12 years old. O ..read more

Dear all, On 1st January of this year, after what feels like centuries of preparation, I launched Diaries of Note, and though incredibly difficult to plan, the premise is simple: every single day, on the Diaries of Note website, I am featuring a single diary entry from history, published on the same day and month that it was originally written. So, for example, on 31st January I featured the diary of Flannery O’Connor, and reprinted an entry written on 31st January in 1944; on 13th January, it was a diary entry of Nelson Mandela‘s, written on 13th January of 1990, and so on. Importantly, no di ..read more

Although they only existed for seven years and released just three albums, Nirvana were a band of immeasurable influence in the music world thanks in no small part to Smells Like Teen Spirit, a single track on Nevermind, their second album. It was this song that brought them out into the open, going on to sell millions of copies and win countless awards, its iconic video seemingly broadcast on MTV every 20 minutes for the next six months. 17 months after Nevermind’s release, the band began to record what would be their final album, In Utero—produced by Steve Albini, outspok ..read more

Born in Cambridge in 1952, Douglas Adams was best known for creating The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a wildly successful project that began in 1978 as a science-fiction comedy radio series and eventually evolved to become something much larger, in many formats and in many languages, adored by many millions of people around the world. This typically entertaining letter, which was actually a fax, was sent in 1992 to US editor Byron Preiss, whose company at the time was producing a comic book adaptation of Adams’ ever-expanding opus. Having noticed some unnecessary changes, Adams was k ..read more

Born in the Czech Republic in 1904, Vilma Grünwald was 39 years old when she wrote a final letter to her husband, Kurt. They had been held at Auschwitz with their two sons for 7 months, separated for much of their ordeal following a stint in a “family camp” that was soon dismantled by the Nazis. One day their eldest son, John, who walked with a limp, was noticed by SS physician Josef Mengele and directed towards the gas chamber; Vilma, unable to watch her son go alone, immediately followed. Vilma with her children. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Vilma wrote the letter days later as s ..read more

When he wrote this letter to his mother in 1944, Roald Dahl was working at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.—one of hundreds of undercover agents employed by Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service to spy on the United States. Dahl’s debut novel, The Gremlins, had been published the year before, and it would be another seventeen years until his first children’s book, James and the Giant Peach, set him on the path to becoming one of the best loved and most entertaining authors in history. What is clear from his countless letters home during World War II, however, is that Dahl had been ..read more

In July of 1938, American novelist Thomas Wolfe was struck down with pneumonia and taken to hospital. He was soon diagnosed as having tuberculosis of the brain, from which he would never recover. Wolfe died on 15th September, aged just 37. A month before his death, as he lay in hospital, Wolfe wrote to his old editor Maxwell Perkins, a once dear friend with whom he had fallen out in 1936 but still loved dearly. Days after Wolfe’s death, Perkins received a letter from another of his authors, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who was acutely aware of the sorrow he now felt, and whom Perkins had shown Wo ..read more