Five Best :: Men of letters (the kind you mail)

OpinionJournal - Five Best :: Pushing the Envelope

1. "Keats: Selected Letters" edited by Robert Gittings and Jo Mee (Oxford, 2002).

2. "Jane Carlyle: Newly Selected Letters" edited by K.J. Fielding and David R. Sorensen (Ashgate, 2004).

3. "Letters of William James" (Kessinger, 2003, a reprint of the 1920 edition).

4. "Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde" edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (Fourth Estate, 2001).

5. "Letters From Oxford" by Hugh Trevor-Roper (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006).

Mr. Gross, a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is the author of "The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters."