person of letters

Fred Chappell, a poet, novelist and critic whose Faulknerian capacity to express universal themes of love, loss and memory through his evocations of North Carolina’s rural, mountainous west earned him a reputation as the South’s “premier contemporary person of letters,” in the words of one reviewer, died on Jan. 4 in Greensboro, N.C.

Taken all in all, her work was that of a complete person of letters and an important public intellectual.

Our culture has become pretty coarse in recent years, so I found it comforting that somewhere I could read something about a person of “letters.”

Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that he was a person of letters in the classic mold, in which literature is defined by its engagement with the world.

“Jon is a true man of letters, or maybe these days we should say person of letters,” said Scott Turow, whose best-selling thriller “Presumed Innocent” was one of Mr. Galassi’s early acquisitions at Farrar, Straus.