A Letter from Martha Rozett

UAlbany English Professor Martha Rozett sent us an e-letter about her new book, When People Wrote Letters: A Family Chronicle:

I am writing to tell you about my new book, WHEN PEOPLE WROTE LETTERS: A FAMILY CHRONICLE. If you can, please come to my book signing on December 8th at Book House in Stuyvesant Plaza from 7:00 to 9:00 PM.

Many of you have heard me talk about this project during the past few years. It is a tale told through wonderfully witty and moving letters, photographs, clippings and pamphlets, excerpts from an unpublished autobiography and from family history narratives, along with other saved objects. The main characters are Betty and Edith Stedman, my mother and her aunt, two eloquent and adventurous women whose relationship serves as the book’s central narrative. Their travels, and the travels of other family members, take the reader from 19th and early twentieth century New England, to Key West in the 1830s, to the Minnesota Territories in the 1860s, to France during World War I, to small towns in Texas and to China in the 1920s, to Spain in the 1930s, and across America during World War II.

WHEN PEOPLE WROTE LETTERS is also an account of my great aunt Edith’s extraordinary career during the early years of medical social work, and a love story in which the religious and cultural differences between New England Episcopalians and New York Jews threaten to disrupt my parents’ romance in the 1940s. And finally, it is about how family chronicles emerge in piecemeal fashion from the objects and documents people save and pass on.
My book will be available after December 8th for $19.95 from the Troy Book Makers (TBMBooks.com), from Book House and other local independent bookstores, and from Amazon and B&N online. It will be available in e-book format in mid to late January. My husband (and very patient tech consultant) John has created a WHEN PEOPLE WROTE LETTERS Facebook page which will tell you more about how I came to write the book. I hope you will join my community of readers and spread the word to others.