man of letters

plural men of letters

1. datedA literary man; a scholar or author.

   He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; […] he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.

   1920, Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC

   1 more example

   This may be accounted for largely on the ground that Cicero and Petrarch were men of the same temperament and cast of mind. They were both typical men of letters. The man of letters is intellectually alert; sensitive to impressions and able to report them; hospitable to all ideas of his time; […]

   1898, James Harvey Robinson, Henry Winchester Rolfe, Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, published 1909, page 229