T. S. Eliot's 1,131 letters to Emily Hale stayed sealed at Princeton for 60 years, and Harvard released his own denial the same day

Emily Hale, Eliot's companion for decades, gave his letters to Princeton under an agreement that they stay closed for 50 years after the later death of either of them. Eliot died in 1965 and Hale on 12 October 1969, so the embargo ran to 2020. Reports differ on the letters' dates (1930 to 1956 or 1957) and the donation year (1956 or the 1950s)^†. Princeton opened 1,131 letters to researchers on 2 January 2020. On the same day Harvard's Houghton Library released a statement Eliot had written in 1960 to be opened with the Hale archive. In it Eliot said he was not in love when he wrote the letters. Eliot's first wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood died in 1947 in an institution^†; he married Valerie Fletcher in 1957, and she controlled his estate afterward. PBS reported scholars considered the letters a major release. Hale's own letters to Eliot are not in the Princeton collection^†.