This landmark volume of correspondence by the great Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) sheds light on the difficulties of a dedicated artist trying to keep afloat in a materialistic society, and on the relation of poetry to a wider culture during the turbulent decades of the twentieth century. Most of the letters here date from the 1920s and 30s, when the young Reznikoff, an NYU law school graduate employed sporadically as editor of legal encyclopedias and as a travelling salesman for his parents' millinery business, devotes his heart and soul to his writing -- turning out poems, plays, short stories and novels which, for want of commercial takers, he himself publishes in small editions. At the center of the volume are many intensely personal and revealing letters to the writer, teacher and Zionist activist Marie Syrkin, who in 1930 became Reznikoff's wife.