Bellow could be a cranky bastard -Saul Bellow's letters

Reading Saul Bellow's letters, an excerpt from a forthcoming collection, in last week's New Yorker - a trip to a bygone era that's not far gone, really. To read his early letters, mostly to fellow writers - you can see that this is how writers communicated to one another in the 40s-80s, way before email, phone calls were expensive, travel was less abundant - they really used these letters to discuss literature, to figure things out, to make amends, and, to a lesser extent, to settle scores. Bellow seems pretty confident of his place in the canon, even from an early age, and you have a sense in reading these that he always was writing for future publication (maybe when young he thought it was because of the recipient). Clear that he could be a cranky bastard - one of the more interesting of the letters is to another writer whom he'd apparently slighted, wounded, or dismissed at a small conference at Wagner College - the letter tries to salve the wounds, but it's clear that Bellow pulled no punches, even in person, and that the fellow writer was not bound for a great career. Another interesting one: his early contact with Roth - Bellow even recommends Roth call his agent, though he's not effusive in his praise of Roth, by any means - can tell him frankly when a story is more idea than story. Fair's fair, and Bellow can be very critical of his own work, esp. his first two novels and then his breakthrough, Augie March - he's aware of how his work can fall short of his ambitions. He seemed to mellow a bit later in life - a long letter to Cynthia Ozick dances around the obvious truth, that Bellow didn't like her Stockholm novel at all (with good reason). By the time Bellow is an icon, it's obvious that people are writing to him in part to have a place in (his) history. How will we ever preserve dialogues and discussions like from today's writers?