Walter Matthias Diggelmann considered himself a writer long before his first book was published. His audience consisted of relatives and friends, and his medium was the letters he sent to them. He later confessed that everything began with letters. When he returned from his adventurous journey to Germany, not yet 20 years old, and first ended up with the police and then in a psychiatric hospital in Switzerland, he started writing letters: letters in which he told his story and tried to make himself understood by his surroundings. Letters were, in a way, the seed of his later literary work. His passion for letter writing remained with him, as evidenced by the extensive correspondence he left behind after his death in 1979. This volume contains a representative selection of those letters that Walter wrote.