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For most of his life, Richard Popkin lived in the pre-email age. When he wanted to share news and ideas with friends and family, he sat down and wrote letters. In the years since his death, as I have worked with the librarians at the William Andrews Clark Library at UCLA and with my mother, Juliet Popkin, to sort and organize my father's papers, I have come to appreciate the energy and creativity my father put into his correspondence. Since his research was such a large part of his life, he shared details about it, not only with professional colleagues, but with friends and family members; conversely, he drew his professional acquaintances into his family life and his personal interests. To be sure, these letters do not always include the "warts and all" that my father tried to be honest about in the two autobiographical essays he published before his death. His letters sometimes gloss over the personal problems he mentioned in those later accounts, and record what was sometimes a difficult family life as a series of amusing anecdotes. Nevertheless, there is no better source for capturing the flavor of my father's personality. His letters reflect his boundless enthusiasm for whatever he was interested in at the moment, his gifts as a story-teller, and his unique sense of humor. In a few instances, they also make it possible to correct statements in his autobiographical essays.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-8474-4_16

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