Wings of Friendship

“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 Ned Rorem has shown us the craft of autobiography in his four five elegant and moving diaries that span the last eighty decades. But besides the publication of his correspondence between himself and Paul Bowles, he has never published the vast correspondence he shared with a sublime mix of people—Leontyne Price, Reynolds Price, Virgil Thompson, Angela Lansbury, Judy Collins, Gore Vidal, Cynthia Ozick. In Wings of Friendship Ned Rorem’s letters to these friends and 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.