'And Mailed This Guy Gold Every Time'

“By all accounts,” writes Erik Bader, “[Guy Davenport] wrote a legit stack of letters every single day, and would respond to literally anyone -- and here’s an anecdote to confirm.” Dave Lull alerted me to Bader’s account of Davenport and an unlikely correspondent that mirrored my own experience with the Kentucky writer and polymath: “Many years ago I wrote an obit on Davenport for a local newspaper and a strange and shy old dude showed up at the bookstore where I worked a few days later. Apparently he lived in a halfway house and said he was moved by my piece and that he used to correspond with Davenport for many years -- he had just written him one day and the dude always wrote back. Yeah right, I thought. Incredibly, he showed up a few days later with a stack of the letters and they were some of the most incredible things I have ever read to this day - the level of care, love, and knowledge dropped into every single one was off the charts. Some were handwritten. Some were…