Careful readers of The New York Times Book Review will likely recognize the name of David English — as will readers of The New Yorker, GQ, and other publications famous and obscure. For 55 years, since he published his first letter in the Clinton (N.Y.) Courier, English has penned perhaps thousands of quirky, erudite, often humorous letters to the editor — with so much succcess that other readers gripe. “How about creating a separate David English letter section, and one for readers who are not David English, like me?” an aggrieved Florida man wrote to the Times in 2022. “What’s the story?” wrote another. “Does his cousin work in the back room?” Others rushed to his defense. “I vote for giving English his own regular column,” wrote a fan from New Haven. A professor (and admitted friend) from Stony Brook University put it succinctly: “Without Gertrude Stein, he is all we have.”
I too had noticed the ubiquitous English, and I was especially curious since he hails from Massachusetts. Now 72, he said he finds the attention “embarrassing and flattering at the same time.” He humbly accepts the sobriquet “private intellectual.” And no, he doesn’t feel he was fated to a life of words because of his last name. “I was just drawn to verbal expression,” he said when I sleuthed him out.
We met at a McDonald’s in Acton, where he moved from Somerville about 5 years ago. He doesn’t have internet at home, so he arrives at his “office” — a corner table in McDonald’s — every morning at 6:30 to spread out the newspapers and ponder. He has a shock of white hair and perfectly round eyeglasses that give him an owlish look. As we talk, he peppers his digressions with bon mots from James Thurber, Charles Schulz, Tom Stoppard, and Groucho Marx.
He’s a self-described magpie: He collects artifacts and ideas, somewhat indiscriminately. He owns 7,000 music CDs and loves The Beatles (“I was an acolyte by the cough on the first track of ‘Revolver’”) and Mozart. But he also defends Mozart’s rival Antonio Salieri, vilified in the movie “Amadeus.” “Salieri had the hard luck to be a competent journeyman in close proximity to a supernova,” he wrote in the Times in 2002.
His memory is prodigious: One recent letter, about hauling books in boxes, referenced Al Pacino’s job with a moving company. Editors at the Times needed to fact check, and English could tell them the date (1979) and publication (Playboy magazine) where he had first read about the odd jobs the actor held. He knows that Rupert Holmes, who wrote the earworm pop song “The Escape,” doesn’t actually like pina coladas, and that Paul Simon’s lyrics in “Baby Driver” refer to Simon’s father.
English was born in El Paso, Texas, but moved around as a child. He acquired his affinity for letters early, sending missives to his grandparents or friends he missed. His working life was equally peripatetic: He wanted to be a cartoonist and drew for the University of Massachusetts Amherst Daily Collegian in the 1970s even though he didn’t attend college there. He worked in a bookstore, then he was an engineer at Boston’s TV 38. In those days the station aired Red Sox games, and when they were rained out, the station staff would show fare like the 1968 B-movie “Mars Needs Women.”
Unlike many letter-writers, English doesn’t tangle with others. “I got very angry at George Carlin once,” he admits, when the comic discouraged people from voting. “Voting isn’t a valentine,” he said, quoting the historian Rebecca Solnit. “It’s a move on a chessboard.” But mostly he isn’t trying to change minds. “You’re making a point, you’re working with language, it’s pleasurable on its own terms.”
Not surprisingly, English admires others who have mastered the epistolary form. He owns collections of letters from Thurber, Mozart, T.S. Eliot. “Letters are often very revealing,” he said. “The writer is at his ease; you often get playful prose.” He has advice for other aspiring letter-writers: “Read the journal for which it’s intended. Keep it as concise as possible. Try to say something distinctive.” As a former editor, these are tips I heartily endorse.
Personally, I read the letters pages in at least two newspapers every day. They are like mini op-eds: digestible opinion bonbons that enhance the civic — and civil — dialogue. Vetted by human editors, they are so much more thoughtful than anonymous hot takes on the comments page.
I often worry that writing letters of all kinds is a dying art form. But then I meet someone like David English, and I go find a stamp.
Renée Loth is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.