By outward appearances, Betty Hester was an unremarkable woman. She never married or had children, living instead with an aunt in a Midtown apartment. She rarely went out for fun. She took the bus each day to work as a file clerk for a credit bureau in downtown Atlanta.
Few people knew that Hester — an avid and insightful reader — was a close friend and confidante of the world-renowned Georgia author Flannery O'Connor, although the two rarely met in person. Over the course of nine years, though, from 1955 until O'Connor's death in 1964, they wrote to each other nearly every week, discussing everything from Catholicism to current events in wide-ranging letters that were "the most personal" of O'Connor's correspondence, according to Bill Sessions, Hester's literary executor.
In an event highly anticipated by O'Connor scholars and fans, her nearly 300 letters to Hester will be opened to the public Saturday at Emory University, where, at Hester's request, they have been kept under seal for 20 years.
The article is mostly about O'Connor, but it also notes that there is a sizable trove of letters by T.S. Eliot that are under seal -- 1,200 letters that will be opened in 2020.
Then there's a follow-up to the O'Connor story, about what happend on the day the letters were released:
Maybe it was just too sunny a day to be spent in the archives on the 10th floor of the Robert W. Woodruff Library on Emory's campus. By 2 o'clock — five hours after the correspondence in two large folders was made public — only five people had signed in and perused the collection of letters written between 1955 and the author's death in 1964.
Larry Hammond, 65, an insurance salesman from Atlanta, was the first to thumb through the stack. "I took a literature class a few years ago and read about this and I was just interested," he said. "I was real surprised by the language — and all the typos."
A closer inspection by O'Connor scholars may yet find great gravity in the missives.
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