Eleanor Roosevelt loved to write

Eleanor loved to write in a way that is not natural for writers. She ripped off sentences like unspooling a thread. She wrote letters to all of her loved ones, not only because she loved us, but because she loved the pen racing across the paper. She loved the appearance of her thoughts in blue ink on white paper. She could have had a bake-off with Anthony Trollope and come in first, most of the time.

Amy Bloom, White Houses (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), p. 175 (voice of a fictionalized Lorena Hickok)

Don't expect an answer from founder of information science

"By the early 1950s, [Claude] Shannon's admirers from around the  world began to seek  him out. They wrote to the oracle at Bell Labs to ask about computers or chess or information theory . . . . Requests also came in through official channels . . . .

Still, most of the letters to Shannon came from academics or chess enthusiastic or weekend tinkerers, schoolchildren or  hobbyists wanting to know more about Theseus [an automated maze-navigating mouse]. On occasion Shannon would answer the letters; more often than not, he would let them languish in piles and folders in his office. . . . the letters would eventually get herded into a folder he  had labeled "Letters I've procrastinated in answering too long." . . . It seemed lost on Shannon that the scientist who had declared that any message could be sent through any noisy channel with almost perfect fidelity was now himself a proven exception. Transmissions could reach Claude Shannon, but then they would fail to go any farther.

Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin, 2012), pp. 140-41

Nightingale's terrific letters

Florence Nightingale was so interesting, daring, and intelligent that reading her letters I had begun to feel, by comparison, frivolous, meek, and not terribly bright. 

Rosemary Mahoney, Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2007), p. 39. (Mahoney enriches her travel writing with quotations from earlier travelers. Florence Nightingale’s published letters are impressive.)

Trouble with the inbox

There are days on which Julia does not open letters. She is overcome, as I understand it, by a sort of superstitious dread, in which she is persuaded that letters bode her no good: they will be from the Gas Board, and demand money; or from the Inland Revenue, and demand accounts; or from some much valued friend, and demand an answer. If a letter arrives on such a day as this, she does not open it but puts it carefully away, to be dealt with when she feels stronger. After that, I had always supposed, it is never seen again.

Sarah Caudwell, The Shortest Way to Hades (New York: Dell, 1995), p. 53. (copyright 1984)

Lousy correspondent

DEAREST TELLY FROM DAY TO DAY ONE THING OR ANOTHER PUTS ME OFF WRITING YOU I AM ASHAMED OF MYSELF . . . PAY NO ATTENTION TO MY SILENCE AND WRITE ME ALWAYS.

Felix Frankfurter, telegram to his sister, Estelle (Telly), Dec. 13, 1935
quoted in Harvard Law Bulletin, Summer 1999, at 32