Concerning Letters

Concerning Letters, often appearing alongside Studies and Essays, is a collection of short prose pieces in the nature of essays by the English writer John Galsworthy (1867–1933). Galsworthy, winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature, is best known for The Forsyte Saga trilogy. His writing, with its calm and restrained style, probes the tensions between social class and human nature, earning him the description of a "humanitarian moralist." This book belongs to his body of essays and short fiction, circulating in the public domain together with such pieces as A Novelist's Allegory, Some Platitudes Concerning Drama, Meditation on Finality, Wanted Schooling, On Our Dislike of Things As They Are, and The Windlestraw. In these texts, Galsworthy starts from the situation of the writer and the artist to discuss creativity, public taste, truth, and the self, often unfolding his ideas through allegory, dialogue, and metaphor, in a tone that is unhurried and tinged with irony. For readers familiar with his novels, these essays fill in another side of his creative vision; for those encountering him for the first time, they offer a light introduction to English literary taste and the intellectual temper of the early twentieth century. It should be noted that "Concerning Letters" on the market generally refers to e-books or public-domain reprints, with scattered version information and varying adaptations and contents, so buyers or downloaders would do well to check which pieces a given edition actually includes.