The Art of Mentoring series was a series of books published by Basic Books from 2001 to 2008, beginning with Alan Dershowitz's Letters to a Young Lawyer and Christopher Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian. The books were all titled in the form "Letters to a Young ____", in the spirit of Rainer Maria Rilke's book Letters to a Young Poet. They were meant to be relatively short guides to various occupations or life paths for someone starting out in that field, from the point of view of an expert.