We're honoring the Platonic ideal by remembering the friendships of some of our favorite authors. Aristotle said, "What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies." But today we're asking, "What is a literary friend? A genius dwelling in two bodies."
Amusements - American Jubilee - Performers - Chorus girls reading letter. Image ID: 1652623

1. James Baldwin and Toni Morrison
   When Baldwin died in 1987, Morrison published a eulogy in the New York Times which began, "Jimmy, there is too much to think about you, and too much to feel. The difficulty is your life refuses summation&emdash;it always did&emdash;and invites contemplation instead. Like many of us left here I thought I knew you. Now I discover that in your company it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: You gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish. We are like Hall Montana watching 'with new wonder' his brother saints, knowing the song he sang is us, 'He is us.'" Baldwin put their friendship more simply: "I dig Toni, and I trust her." We agree!
2. Harper Lee and Truman Capote
   Monroeville, Alabama might not seem like fertile soil for literary genius, but it's the hometown of both Harper Lee and Truman Capote. When Capote wrote In Cold Blood, Lee accompanied him on his reporting trip. When Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, she based the character Dill on Capote. And eventually, their friendship would be memorably dramatized by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener in the biopic Capote.
3. Henry James and Edith Wharton
   Henry James and Edith Wharton would suffer some writerly rivalry in their friendship, but they also showed a lot of nickname game. James called Wharton Princesse Rapprochee and Firebird. Wharton called him Cherest Maitre. You can read their correspondence in Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900-1915.
4. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
   Randall Jarell introduced Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell in 1947. What resulted was three decades of friendship between two of the most important American poets of the 20th century. Lowell would tell Bishop, "I think I must write entirely for you." Today 459 of their letters can be read in Words in Air.
5. Rivka Galchen and Karen Russell
   In 2014, we were lucky enough to host writer-buds Rivka Galchen and Karen Russell. Here's what happens when two of the most talented authors around hang out.
6. On August 10, 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville met on a picnic hike. Melville soon became a frequent houseguest at the Hawthorne residence, where the two talked ontological heroics. Eventually, Melville would dedicate Moby Dick to his friend.
7. Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara
   We all know about Ginsberg's relationship with Jack Kerouac, but Ginsberg moved in circles beyond the Beats. He dedicated the poem "My Sad Self" to O'Hara.
8. Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace
   Following the death of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen wrote an essay for the New Yorker on his friendship with Wallace, Robinson Crusoe, the novel, Masafuera, loneliness, and betrayal called "Farther Away." In perhaps the most difficult and unseemly-in-its-honesty passage, he writes, "He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend. People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in the Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul. A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure. Of course, he was a national treasure, and, being a writer, he didn’t “belong” to his readers any less than to me. But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies—than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him."
9. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
   Why two is better than one: can you say Lyrical Ballads?
10. Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Gilbert
    One of our favorite podcasts ever was the episode featuring Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Gilbert, talking shop and palling around.