Jeremy Wayne Tate Profile picture
May 14 27 tweets 8 min read Read on X
The handwriting of famous authors - thread 🧵

1. Fyodor Dostoevsky's manuscript draft of The Brothers Karamazov Image
2. Even in his final hours, the night before he died, C.S. Lewis took time to write a letter to a child:

"Dear Philip, to begin with, may I congratulate you on writing such a remarkably good letter; I certainly could not have written it at your age. And to go on with, thank you for telling me that you like my books, a thing an author is always pleased to hear. It is a funny thing that all the children who have written to me see at once who Aslan is, and grown ups never do!"Image
3. J. R. R. Tolkien's letter from Aragorn to Sam Gamgee, in which the King of Gondor informs the hobbit of his future visit and expresses his desire to "greet all his friends."

This handwritten letter, penned in Sindarin Tengwar, was created as an epilogue to The Lord of the Rings but was not included in the published edition.Image
4. Having a bad day? Imagine being the editor who opened the mailbox to find this manuscript revised by James Joyce. Image
5. Leonardo da Vinci—the legendary left handed polymath—famously used mirror writing, where words appear reversed. To this day, his decision to use this method remains a topic of debate among experts:

• Many suggest that it prevented smudging, common for left-handed writers

• Some propose it as a form of reinforcement learning

• Others argue it hindered idea theftImage
6. Ernest Hemingway's reading list for a young writer Image
7. Friedrich Nietzsche announces the title of his new book (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) in a letter to Heinrich Köselitz. Image
8. In 2022, esteemed scholar Virgiliano Rodolfo Signorini urged caution regarding a potentially groundbreaking discovery: a 1295 parchment possibly bearing Dante Alighieri's signature.

This could be the first example of handwriting attributed to Italy's 'national poet' and the father of modern Italian.Image
9. F. Scott Fitzgerald conjugates "to Cocktail," the Ultimate Jazz-Age Verb, in a 1928 letter to Blanche Knopf. Image
10. Charles Dickens's handwritten manuscript of Oliver Twist Image
11. Oscar Wilde’s edits to The Picture of Dorian Gray Image
12. A 1974 copy of The Gulag Archipelago with a magnificent inscription by Nobel prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Image
13. In May 1889, as Walt Whitman was approaching his seventieth birthday, Mark Twain wrote a letter of congratulations to "the father of free verse.” Image
14. William Shakespeare's six surviving signatures are all from legal documents Image
15. War and Peace handwritten by Leo Tolstoy Image
16. George Orwell's 1984 manuscript

"The three slogans of the Party:

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength" Image
17. Carl Jung's 1938 letter about Abraham Lincoln Image
18. A page of Franz Kafka's diaries Image
19. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time manuscript Image
20. This Edgar Allan Poe’s letter pleading for $40 from a Philadelphia editor was sold 173 years later for $125,000. Image
21. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's handwritten manuscript of Sherlock Holmes Image
22. Herman Melville declines to write encyclopedia entries: "I am unpracticed in a kind of writing that exacts so much heedfulness" (December 11, 1887) Image
23. Draft page of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967 Image
24. Autograph letter signed by Alexandre Dumas Image
25. The handwriting of Miguel de Cervantes in a letter written by him to Archbishop of Toledo, 1616 Image
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this thread, please share the post and follow our work @CLT_Exam. We are bringing traditional/classical education back to America! Some other great accounts to follow: @soren_schwab, @A_C_C_S, @alecmbianco, @goodwind67, @HootenWilson, @AnikaFreeindeed, @jennfrey, @Culture_Crit
@CLT_Exam @soren_schwab @A_C_C_S @alecmbianco @goodwind67 @HootenWilson I have also recently discovered @JamesLucasIT. He is one of the most electric accounts on this platform. His work inspired this thread. If you are not already following James you need to!

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In the midst of a brutal conflict, British and German soldiers laid down their weapons for a brief moment of peace, showing the power of humanity even in the darkest of times… (thread) 🧵 Image
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Every year, from 1920 to 1943, the Tolkien children received letters from Father Christmas hilmself.

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Here’s the story behind them... (thread)🧵 Image
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Today, November 29th, is C. S. Lewis' birthday.

Here are 20 powerful lessons from the most quoted Christian author of the 20th century 🧵

1. "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." Image
2. Lewis viewed faith as a spiritual commitment.

In Mere Christianity, he wrote: "Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods."

True faith perseveres, even when emotions and circumstances waver.Image
3. "Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the universe has no meaning we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning." Image
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It is one of the 24 original Meteora monasteries, with "Meteora" meaning "suspended in the air" in Greek.
3. The Sacra di San Michele, a medieval monastery over 1,000 years old, served as the inspiration for Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.
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