UMass Dartmouth professor is in the fight to keep letters alive

According to a University of Massachusetts Dartmouth professor, letters are “moribund” – in terminal decline.  

“In five, six years, I don’t think anybody will be writing letters except for moi,” UMass Dartmouth professor emeritus Mel Yoken said to a crowd gathered on Thursday, May 23 for the Claire T. Carney Library Association’s annual meeting.

Yoken started writing and collecting letters as a graduate student at Brown University in the 1960s. He said he began writing letters – both in English and French – to authors that he found interesting and had questions about their work. 

Yoken never stopped writing these letters even to this day. The collection now sits at over 400,000 letters of “great import,” he said. His vast collection is split and stored between Brown University and UMass Dartmouth.

Carol Gafford, a Swansea librarian and attendee said that like Yoken, she has written to authors who responded to her. 

“You learn a lot about people through letters,” Gafford said.

Yoken summed up his stance in one sentence, saying that letters are important “for the value of research and history.” 

Just as he has done for the last 60 years, Yoken wrote a letter that was handed out to the audience before his lecture. It read: “spoken words grow dim with time; written words last forever.”