Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984

This collection of letters exchanged between Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin records a friendship that lasted more than forty years. These scholars, both giants in their own fields, shared news of family and events, academic gossip, personal and professional vicissitudes, academic successes, and, most important, ideas. Heilman and Voegelin first became acquainted around 1942, when Voegelin delivered a guest lecture for the political science department at Louisiana State University. At that time, Heilman was teaching in the English department at LSU along with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. What started as simple exchanges soon grew into full-fledged correspondence - beginning with an eight-page letter by Voegelin commenting on Heilman’s manuscript on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Their correspondence lasted until four months before Voegelin’s death in 1985. These letters represent Voegelin’s most prolonged correspondence conducted in English with an American and provide readers with an insight into Voegelin as a literary critic. While Voegelin’s analysis of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is well known, these letters reveal the source and genesis of the essay.