Editor's Note: In Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste, Luke Barr captures the season -- a few months during 1970 -- a group of culinary icons found themselves all together -- cooking, eating, gossiping, and arguing -- in the South of France. Barr, the great-nephew of M.F.K. Fisher, studied his great aunt's journals and letters from that seminal time. Here, as part of Biographile's Lessons Learned month, a month of authors sharing lessons they've learned while writing their book, Barr speaks to the intimate nature of letters and the importance of internalizing your source material.

Provence, 1970 is my first book, and the most important thing I learned as I wrote was the value of total immersion in my source material.

I was lucky to be writing about a group of people who were all excellent and prolific writers of letters. (And who saved their correspondence!) I was immediately struck by how very different all of them came across in their letters than in their published work. My great aunt M.F.K. Fisher, in particular, was a beautifully elliptical, evocative, and mysterious writer of books and memoir. But her letters were something else -- direct, funny, confiding and full of gossip. Much closer to the real-life M.F., in other words. She was a master of the form, and kept up an ongoing correspondence with a wide range of people, for decades. Many of her letters are archived at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, as are Julia Child’s and Simone Beck’s, and as I embarked on my research I couldn’t help but look up some of my own childhood letters to her. In the late 1970’s when she was ill and briefly hospitalized, I sent her a terrible poem, rhyming fourth-grader couplets about hospitals and doctors, to which she responded with wry amusement.

My book tells the story of a few months during the fall and winter of 1970 when M.F, Child, and Beck, as well as James Beard, Richard Olney, and Judith Jones -- all seminal figures in the American food world -- were in Provence at the same time. I collected the letters they wrote each other in the months before and after the trip. But my most crucial discovery was the daily letters that M.F. wrote to her long-distance lover, Arnold Gingrich, during this period.

Daily letters!

It it hard to overstate how important these letters were in the writing of my book -- a detailed record of meals, conversations, excursions to museums, changing weather and shifting moods. Gingrich was the founding editor of Esquire magazine, and he and M.F. kept up an erudite, intimate correspondence for years.

I would start work on each chapter by reading through all of the letters, diary entries, and interview notes I had transcribed during my research from all of my subjects -- hundreds of pages of them -- to find relevant quotes and information. This would yield a sprawling compendium of possibly relevant material, which I would eventually turn into scenes and narrative. All of the quotations in my book are sourced in the endnotes.

Then it was on to the next chapter, and the process repeated itself. Once again, I read through all of the letters, and pulled relevant quotations. And now an interesting thing began to happen, and something I hadn’t anticipated: The more wrote, the better I came to know my subjects. Pretty soon, I had effectively memorized and internalized my source material, not just the facts and the timeline -- who came to dinner when and what did they cook -- but a store of granular details, conversation topics, opinions about politics and restaurants, fleeting attitudes, the words and phrases they used, everything I could possibly find in their letters and writings from that time that I could bring to bear on my story. It was deep and repeated immersion in these letters that allowed me to bring the material to life, and to really understand the people, and the time, I was writing about.

For all Lessons Learned articles, visit the archive here.