Summer may seem like the ideal postcard-writing season, what with cruises and camp, but we’ve always been most inspired to write them in the fall, when the leaves are changing and we’re feeling wistful. So to amp up that wistful feeling a bit — and since as you’ve probably noticed, we just can’t get enough of ogling literary ephemera — we went on the hunt for interesting postcards written by famous authors, from Jack Kerouac to Franz Kafka to Rainer Maria Rilke. After the jump, admire the penmanship, doodles, and forceful words of a few of your favorite authors, and be sure to link us to any interesting literary postcards we missed in the comments.
A line in the sand, from Jack Kerouac to editor Malcolm Cowley, 1956. [via]
From a very lonely F. Scott Fitzgerald to himself. [via]
From Ernest Hemingway to Gertrude Stein, 1924. [via]
From David Foster Wallace to Don DeLillo. [via]
From Patti Smith to her sister Kimberly, 1968. [via]
From Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 1912. [via]
From Rainer Maria Rilke to Hedwig Fischer, 1924. [via]
From Kurt Vonnegut to pen pal David Breithaupt. [via]
From C.S. Lewis to Robert W. Burchfield, written in Anglo-Saxon, 1953. [via]
From Allen Ginsberg to Ed White, 1971. [via]
From James Joyce to publisher Elkin Matthews, 1908. [via]
From Franz Kafka to Kurt Wolff, 1913. [via]
From Henry Miller to V.E. Moody, 1978. [via]
From Truman Capote to Boris Groudinko, 1960s. [via]
From William S. Burroughs to underground artist S. Clay Wilson, 1982. Those are bullet holes. [via]