Letters, 1905-1965
He was a physician, theologian, teacher, organist, scholar, Nobel laureate. He wrote books on Bach and on Indian religion, on the life of Jesus and on organ construction. He built hospitals and huts, agitated for disarmament, and devoted his life to missionary and medical service in Lambarene, Gabon. Among his friends he could claim Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Bertrand Russell, Dag Hammarskjold, Norman Cousins, and Jawaharlal Nehru, and he carried on a voluminous. correspondence with them and with presidents, philosophers, musicians, kings, and religious leaders around the world. Albert Schweitzer's life defined for the world the ideals of service, altruism, and principle. His letters constitute virtually a complete autobiography - and the clearest insight yet into the man John F. Kennedy called "one of the transcendent moral influences of our century." Beginning with a 1905 letter to the Paris Mission Society in which he presents. his credentials for missionary work and reveals his longing to serve a higher calling, his correspondence chronicles a life characterized by intellectual cultivation and passionate involvement in the most critical issues of the twentieth century. In these letters we follow the founding and growth of his hospital in Lambarene; the development of his philosophy of the "reverence for life"; his journeys to Europe and America to give concerts and raise funds for the. hospital; his receiving of the Nobel Peace Prize (to which he responded, "You really mucked up my life! Journalists descended on me like locusts and forced me to give them information, interviews.... I am using the major part of the prize to buy cement, hardwood beams, and corrugated iron for my buildings"); and his growing alarm through the 1950s and 1960s over the threat to world peace posed by nuclear arms. By turns witty, exhortatory, candid, brilliant, and eloquent, the letters display a breathtaking capacity for work and achievement on many fronts. Albert Schweitzer's letters reveal his most deeply held convictions, his accomplishments and frustrations, and his work and life in the African hospital where he spent most of his years. They are moving and inspiring invitation into the heart and mind of a prodigious human being.
