Wings of Friendship: Selected Letters, 1944-2003

"When it comes to letter writing, do artists resemble their letters? Yes, except when they don't." So wrote Ned Rorem in his 1998 review of Prokofiev's letters. Over the years Rorem has shown us the craft of autobiography in his five elegant and moving diaries that span the last eight decades. But besides the publication of his correspondence between himself and Paul Bowles, Ned Rorem--one of America's foremost living composers and the former president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters--has never published the vast correspondence he shared with a sublime mix of people, such as Leontyne Price, Virgil Thompson, Reynolds Price, Angela Lansbury, Judy Collins, Gore Vidal, Cynthia Ozick. In "Wings of Friendship, " Rorem's letters to these friends and to more than forty others are assembled in chronological order and reveal the range of his interests and depth of his passions--a heart laid bare, billets doux.