Letters are the only form in all literature, in all the arts, which reposes on the communication of one to one. It is this condition which renders [them] the pre-eminent vehicle for that aspect of life which is generally excluded from all literature except the novel: those innumerable trifles of the daily life, that rain of trifling details, pleasing and vexatious, which falls upon the just and the unjust and which is also an inescapable concomitant of all human life.

—THORNTON WILDER,
JOURNALS, AUGUST 20, 1951