Dear Sandy, Hello: Letters from Ted to Sandy Berrigan

Letters illuminating a legendary literary love affair and the young artists who made 1960s New York the world’s cultural capital.

Ted and Sandy Berrigan’s honeymoon ended when her father, a well-connected doctor, forced Sandy into a mental hospital, had Ted run out of town by the sheriff, and hired private detectives to investigate his friends. These intimate, irresistible letters, written over the course of their three-month separation, read like a passionate, epistolary novel—full of longing, intrigue, and gossip. They also offer serious advice for developing readers and writers, bring the thriving cultural scene in mid-twentieth-century New York to life, and serve as a day-by-day chronicle of Ted Berrigan’s developing voice.

Ted Berrigan (1934-1983), a central figure in the second generation of New York School poets, was the author of more than twenty books including The Sonnets, So Going Around Cities, and A Certain Slant of Sunlight. The editor and publisher of C Magazine, he also wrote art criticism and became an influential mentor to an entire generation of writers.