Full name: Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford

Authors: Jessica Mitford, Peter Y. Sussman Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Non Fiction, Biographies, History Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780375410321 0375410325

"Decca" Mitford lived a larger-than-life life: born into the British aristocracy--one of the famous (and sometimes infamous) Mitford sisters--she ran away to Spain during the Spanish Civil War with her cousin Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill's nephew, then came to America, became a tireless political activist and a member of the Communist Party, and embarked on a brilliant career as a memoirist and muckraking journalist (her funeral-industry expose, The American Way of Death, became an instant classic). She was a celebrated wit, a charmer, and throughout her life a prolific and passionate writer of letters--now gathered here. Decca's correspondence crackles with irreverent humor and mischief, and with acute insight into human behavior (and misbehavior) that attests to her generous experience of the worlds of politics, the arts, journalism, publishing, and high and low society. Here is correspondence with everyone from Katharine Graham and George Jackson, Betty Friedan, Miss Manners, Julie Andrews, Maya Angelou, Harry Truman, and Hillary Rodham Clinton to Decca's sisters the Duchess of Devonshire and the novelist Nancy Mitford, her parents, her husbands, her children, and her grandchildren. In a profile of J.K. Rowling, The Daily Telegraph (UK), said, "Her favorite drink is gin and tonic, her least favorite food, trip. Her heroine is Jessica Mitford." Similar books: Love from Nancy by Nancy Mitford The Mitfords by Charlotte Mosley The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh by Nancy Mitford Too Brief a Treat by Truman Capote The Element of Lavishness by Sylvia Townsend Warner Vita and Harold by Vita Sackville-West The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy by Shelby Foote Irrepressible by Leslie Brody Letters Home by Sylvia Plath Letters from Africa, 1914-1931 by Isak Dinesen Yours, Plum by P. G. Wodehouse Screams from the Balcony by Charles Bukowski The Letters of Kingsley Amis by Kingsley Amis The House of Mitford by Jonathan Guinness The Wright Brothers by David McCullough Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester Zeitoun by Dave Eggers Mobituaries by Mo Rocca Gandhi by Mahatma Gandhi