Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship

In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, intensely curious and intensely gifted poet in remission from pediatric cancer.

Over the next four years-in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health began to decline, even as his productivity bloomed-the two traded a series of letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, the loving playfulness of postmodernism, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in the spirit of generosity and love. We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is, Ritvo writes. And that’s all I want-is to know you forever.

Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.