Lit Hub Daily: July 23, 2019

• Behind the myths of Scott and Zelda’s epic romance: Eleanor Lanahan on her grandparents’ love letters. | Lit Hub
• Some free summer reading advice: cultivate an obsession with Mary McCarthy’s “grimly truthful and strangely modern” The Group. | Lit Hub
• Andy Sweet’s iconic photography documents the vanishing elderly Jewish communities of South Beach. | Lit Hub
• Rick Moody, life coach, returns to tackle questions of body image and self-loathing (with a little help from Lidia Yuknavitch). | Lit Hub
• “Poets embrace nuance. Lawyers seek to crush it.” Elizabeth Bales Frank on the pleasures and perils of life as a law firm’s poet laureate. | Lit Hub
• Telling the Finnish-American immigrant story: Karl Marlantes on the lumberjacking lives of his ancestors. | Lit Hub
• Christopher Benfey, the author of If: The Unfold Story of Kipling’s American Years, recommends five books from Rudyard Kipling’s New England. | Book Marks
• “I feel such a sense of loss when I think of the great, unwritten poems that took a backseat to polished floors.” On the biggest threat to creative women: a structural lack of uninterrupted alone time. | The Guardian
• Jill Lepore on the domestic life and literary legacy of Herman Melville, who “wrote most of Moby-Dick on land, in a valley, on a farm, in a house a-dither with his wife, his sisters, and his mother, a family man’s Walden.” | The New Yorker
• “Fiction 101 teaches a writer to reveal character through action, and a story producer on The Bachelorette has no option but to do anything else.” A reality TV producer and novelist on The Bachelorette-as-MFA. | Vanity Fair
• Read a lost 1933 essay by Langston Hughes, never before published in English. | Smithsonian
• “There’s an intellectual arrogance about someone who has decided that non-literary fiction is boring and blank”: Irish author Colm Tóibín is under fire for dismissing genre fiction (and the Golden Age of television!). | The Irish Times
• A group of House Republicans wants Amazon to reverse its ban on selling gay conversion therapy books. | Vice
• Pablo Picasso was a prolific writer in the latter half of his life. A recent traveling exhibition explored the influence of Chinese art and writing styles on Picasso’s poetry. | The Telegraph

Also on Lit Hub: On the uncomfortable contradictions of “Amazing Grace,” which was written by a slave trader • A poem by Jana Prikryl from her collection No Matter • Read an excerpt from Natalia Ginzburg’s novel Happiness, as Such (tr. Minna Zallman Proctor).