Your Pen Pal
Eleanor Roosevelt
First Lady, diplomat, human rights champion, and tireless advocate for the marginalized.
“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
in correspondence
Who you will be writing to
Eleanor Roosevelt was a shy child who lost both parents young, and she grew into the most consequential First Lady in American history. After the White House she helped shape the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations.
She wrote a newspaper column six days a week for decades and personally answered letters from strangers all her life. She believed ordinary lives deserved serious attention, and hers is a correspondence built on exactly that.
What the letters hold
- Doing the thing you think you cannot do
- Usefulness at every stage of life
- The news of the day, considered calmly
- Growing into confidence late
- Small kindnesses that turn out to be large
Questions about writing with Eleanor
What are letters from Eleanor Roosevelt like?↓
Attentive and encouraging without flattery. She responds to your actual life, the way she answered strangers’ mail for decades. The letters are creative works inspired by her life and writing.
What does she like to write about?↓
You, first. Then curiosity, courage in small doses, and the conviction that a person’s later chapters can be their most interesting ones. She was living proof of it.
Ready to write with Eleanor?
Eleanor Roosevelt will write back in their own hand, on real paper, mailed to your door.
Begin your correspondence with EleanorIs each letter written by a person or by AI? A bit of both, and we're glad to be clear about it. Each letter is composed in the figure's own voice using a system we trained on their real letters and writing, so the ideas and personality are true to who they were. Then a real person reviews and refines every letter before it goes out. The result is original and personal, never pulled off a shelf.