The Groucho Letters: Letters to and from Groucho Marx

THE GROUCHO LETTERS enjoys the very best of Groucho’s correspondence with the greatest wits and minds of his day. Correspondents include James Thurber, T.S. Eliot, President Harry Truman, Edward R. Murrow, Jerry Lewis, Howard Hughes, Irving Berlin and of course, Chico, Harpo and Gummo. He writes to comics, corporations, children, presidents, and even his daughter’s boyfriend. Here is Groucho swapping photos with T. S. Eliot (‘I had no idea you were so handsome!’); advising his son on courting a rich dame (‘Don’t come out bluntly and say, How much dough have you got? That wouldn’t be the Marxian way’); reacting with utmost composure when informed that he has been made into a verb by James Joyce (‘There’s no reason why I shouldn’t appear in Finnegan’s Wake . I’m certainly as bewildered about life as Joyce was’); and crisply declining membership in a Hollywood club (‘I don’t care to belong to any social organization that will accept me as a member’). No personage is too big, no nuance too small, no subject too far-out for Groucho’s spontaneous, hilarious, and ferocious typewriter.