Dear Stephanie, Dear Paul: A Transatlantic Love Story Told Through the Correspondence of Stephanie Grant and Paul M. Duke, 1948-1949

by Paul M. Duke

Book Overview

.In flight with American Airlines
10:00 p.m., 27th April 1949 Dear Stephanie,
I hardly know where to begin. I am on a monstrous machine that is taking me thousands of miles away from you.
Did you stay to see us take off? After I left you I had to wait in the passengers' lounge for nearly an hour, and I never spent a more miserable hour in my life Parting may be "sweet sorrow," but I don't mean to be parted from you again. The next...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0595395058
• ISBN13: 9780595395057
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Like the Prequel to 84 Charing Cross Road

84 Charing Cross Road will always be the greatest representative of the genre of literate post-WWII trans-Atlantic pen-pallery. However, this collection of letters between an eighteen-year-old Akron bricklayer and a sixteen-year-old London typist does feature one thing Helene Hanff could not give us: a happy ending. The correspondents whose charming letters from the years 1948-49 comprise this book settled down in 1950 to a marriage the afterword informs me is still going strong as of the year 2006. It's easy to see why in the book, as the correspondents discuss current events and bond over a shared love of books, theater, music, and movies. Their cosmopolitan tastes stand up to the test of time; most of the cultural references were familiar to me some fifty years later (and how I envied them having seen Olivier tread the boards!). Dear Stephanie, Dear Paul also contains an intriguing element of suspense. In the first half of the book, the young pen pals introduce each other, bond, and arrange to meet; in the second half, having met and gotten along very well, these poor teenagers have to deal with the messy complexities of a real-life romance from thousands of miles away. Paul, typically American, comes on too strong; Stephanie, typically English, withdraws into a protective shell of common sense; letters become perfunctory and infrequent, and it becomes evident that this love is in no way predestined. Of course we know they will end up together -- it's on the back of the book, and anyway I just told you -- but it is an interesting exercise to look for a spot to put a bookmark in the last half of the book and say, "This is where most of these long-distance romances would have ended." Considering that each book is nonfiction, it is interesting how many themes this book shares with 84 Charing Cross Road, from the typical American/British cultural divide to the deprivation of postwar England and the English gratitude for kindly Americans willing to send over nylons, soap, and canned ham. The book also contains also a strong feeling of the bonding power of art. Most importantly, as with 84 Charing Cross Road, both correspondents are good writers and sympathetic folks (if less worldly-wise and deep than the older correspondents in Hanff's book). Dear Stephanie, Dear Paul is a pleasant way to spend an afternoon getting to know two splendid people in just the way they got to know each other.

Charming and Delightful

I am lucky enough to know both of the authors, and to have listened to the BBC program (on tape) which was broadcast in the late 80s and charmed me with excerpts of the correspondance which lead to their marriage and more than fifty years of articulate life together. Their growing epistletory relationship is as fascinating as the details of postwar life in Britain and the US. I think most readers who have enjoyed, for instance, the work of Helen Hanff, could not fail to be delighted with this.

These real-life letters make an amazing, page-turner of a real story!

This is an amazing book for three reasons. One: It is truly a page turner. The correspondence of these two young pen pals in the immediate aftermath of World War II turns out to be a real life drama with a plot that couldn't have been better masterminded than a great fiction writer. Second, it celebrates the art of correspondence that, while not dead, has certainly become a hobby for fewer people. Third, it reveals a time in the not so distant past when everyday people, a young blue collar worker and office clerk, enjoyed a deep immersion in the arts. It wasn't PBS. It wasn't elite. It was their everyday lives, and their mutual love of these arts brought them together for a lifetime.