For the last six years the scarred wooden tray on my desk that serves as an in-box has contained a handful of letters from writer John Nichols.

I felt honored to have had a chance to correspond with him but never resolved what to do with the letters. So the letters have remained there, bound together with a paperclip, until word reached me last week that Nichols had died.

A much-admired author, especially among writers, Nichols penned more than a dozen novels along with a number of nonfiction works. On hearing the news of his passing, Nichols’ fans probably looked on their bookshelves to see if they still had a copy of his first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo, which was made into a popular movie starring Liza Minnelli. New Mexicans, however, were more likely to reach for their dog-eared copy of The Milagro Beanfield War. This, too, was made into a movie directed by Robert Redford.

Instead of turning to his books, I took the letters he wrote to me out of the tray and reread them in the quiet of my living room. As a biographer, my work calls on me to read letters, thousands upon thousands of them, to gain insights into my subjects. My small cache of letters from Nichols told me a lot about him.

From the first letter I received in 2017, Nichols’s humbleness was inescapable. The three-page, single-spaced, typed letter was in response to my queries about Tony Hillerman, whose biography I was writing. He spoke in a deferential tone about Hillerman and said that, like the mystery author, he always remained willing to provide a leg up to an aspiring writer by writing a comment that could be used to publicize the new work. “I thought if I ever wrote an autobiography, I should simply call it The Blurbist ,or Memoirs of a Blurbist,” he told me.

His letters revealed that he also shared with Hillerman a delight in telling a self-deprecating tale. He recounted how in the early 1980s, he served on a panel at a Western Writers Convention where he spoke out in a fierce and accusatory tone about racism implicit in books by older Western writers. “But the funny thing (at least to me!) is that after I shot my self-righteous mouth off,” he wrote, “I pushed my chair back from our table in triumph, forgetting that we were on a stage that dropped off right behind

us, and so I stumbled over backwards, and I believe the audience cheered wildly because I had gotten my comeuppance!”

Nichols’ reading of my book about the friendship between writers Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos prompted him to tell me of his first visit to Spain in 1960 following Hemingway’s path and literary tracks. Nineteen years old at the time, Nichols attended a bullfighting school and ran with the bulls for six

As a biographer, my work calls on me to read letters, thousands upon thousands of them, to gain insights into my subjects. My small cache of letters from Nichols told me a lot about him.

of the seven days of San Fermin. “So,” he said, “I practically memorized The Sun Also Rises, and Death in the Afternoon was my Bible for a while.”

Each letter contained a gem like this, displaying a consuming passion and a reverence for the written word. But he resisted solemness common to many authors and his notes to me celebrated life’s funny moments. Readers wanting to sample Nichols’ hilarious tales of his writing life can find them interspersed in his brutally honest memoir I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer, the last book he published.

I know I am not alone in being so lucky to receive letters from Nichols, always delivered by mail as he chose not to use email. “I have many correspondences with people I’ve never met, but we’ve exchanged three-page typed letters for 40 or 50 years,” Nichols told Lynne Robinson of the Taos News. “Just people who write to thank me for this book or that book, or say they felt a bond with me. All writers have experiences like that. I can’t imagine what someone like Tony Hillerman or Rudy Anaya have gone through. Thank God I’m not famous.”

Our final exchange of letters centered on making plans, cautious plans because of COVID and his ill health, to meet for a meal in Taos. Our meeting never happened. I should have picked up on the clue he provided when he confessed to me that he had studied the bibliography in my Hemingway book to speed his search for something to read. “Obviously,” he said, “my time is running out.”