Letters from My Windmill (French: Lettres de mon moulin) is a collection of short stories by Alphonse Daudet first published in its entirety in 1869. Some of the stories had been published earlier in newspapers or journals such as Le Figaro and L'Evénement as early as 1865.
The stories are all told by the author in the first person, typically addressing a Parisian reader. The author, having relocated his home from Paris, recounts short bucolic tales about his new life in Provence as well as his trips to Corsica and French Algeria. Considered to be light-hearted, and often a bit tongue-in-cheek, the stories vary from day-to-day events in southern France to Provençal folk-tales, and often feature professions and faunal references characteristic of Provence.
Letters From My Windmill is sometimes considered to be Daudet's most important work. It is cherished by many French, particularly in the South, for the picture it paints of the local culture.
A French-language movie was made in 1954 by Marcel Pagnol composed of four stories: "The Three Low Masses", "The Elixir of Father Gaucher", "The Priest of Cucugnan" and "The Secret Of Master Cornille".
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“American thinking, when it concerns itself with beautiful letters as when it concerns itself with religious dogma or political theory, is extraordinarily timid and superficial ... [I]t evades the genuinely serious problems of art and life as if they were stringently taboo ... [T]he outward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always the virtues, not of profundity, not of courage, not of originality, but merely those of an emasculated and often very trashy dilettantism.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)