Another writer comes to mind: Anaïs Nin. Totally self absorbed. There is nothing to be taken from her diaries or fiction.
Yes, Moby-Dick is semi autobiographical. I suppose Huckleberry Finn is too.
Think also: Thomas Wolfe.
Beginning writers are told to write about themselves. To draw upon their own experience.
Let’s take Anaïs Nin for the moment. Her works are all about herself and her love affairs. I believe that this is true of her fiction as well,
How about Henry Miller, Nin’s companion and admirer?
Walt Whitman?
Miller’s works are all about him and his adventures. Yet somehow he gets outside of himself. And the people he encounters are not just reflections of him.
As did Walt Whitman.
The persona (Whitman himself) is omnipresent in Leaves of Grass.
So we encounter Whitman and conclude, take away from it, that he had an interesting life and interesting experiences in nineteenth century America? And nothing more?
“U.S. to Send Dozens Back to Afghanistan, Despite Risk of Persecution”
The Trump administration plans to fly the Afghan immigrants from Louisiana to Pakistan, where they are expected to be expelled over the border to Afghanistan.
By Pranav Baskar, Hamed Aleaziz, and Elian Peltier
These were the words of former FBI agent Michael Feinberg, in a segment of MS NOW’s Dateline White House on October 27.
The program featured an interview with the parents of Alex Pretti, who was murdered by ICE on January 24, 2026.
Feinberg criticized ICE’s response, noting a statement by secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem that Pretti had committed an act of “domestic terrorism.”
And noted that, during his time with the FBI, notorious criminals were arrested, who deserved their punishment. But (as Feinberg noted), “we also recognized their baseline humanity.”
In other words, did not exercise, inflict, gratuitous cruelty.
They could have come from Matthew 7:12, updated in terms of the parlance of present day officialdom.
They express pointedly something deliberately ignored by practitioners of state sanctioned cruelty.
Which, of course, is everywhere you look.
Which delights the MAGA crowed and is (or was) A — if not THE — guiding principle of acolytes like Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Markwayne Mullin, Pete Hesgeth, Kristin Noem, and Pam Bondi. Donald Trump.
“Don’t Write Off Cursive; Teaching kids how to write in script is no longer a priority in American schools, but it should be.” By Bobby George, June George, and Quartz. The Atlantic, October 1, 2013
I remember — and so does my wife — the Palmer Method of penmanship as it was applied, mostly, if I recall correctly, in the second and third grades. The letters hanging on the wall, circling the classroom, each like a sign.
The letter I proudly wrote to my third grade teacher upon her retirement in 1954.
And the following, for example:
Mrs. Dorothy Handy (my mother’s great-grandmother) to her son Henry Handy, when the latter was at sea: December 1875
Как ни старались люди, собравшись в одно небольшое место несколько сот тысяч, изуродовать ту землю, на которой они жались, как ни забивали камнями землю, чтобы ничего не росло на ней, как ни счищали всякую пробивающуюся травку, как ни дымили каменным углем и нефтью, как ни обрезывали деревья и ни выгоняли всех животных и птиц, — весна была весною даже и в городе. Солнце грело, трава, оживая, росла и зеленела везде, где только не соскребли ее, не только на газонах бульваров, но и между плитами камней, и березы, тополи, черемуха распускали свои клейкие и пахучие листья, липы надували лопавшиеся почки; галки, воробьи и голуби по-весеннему радостно готовили уже гнезда, и мухи жужжали у стен, пригретые солнцем. Веселы были и растения, и птицы, и насекомые, и дети. Но люди — большие, взрослые люди — не переставали обманывать и мучать себя и друг друга. Люди считали, что священно и важно не это весеннее утро, не эта красота мира божия, данная для блага всех существ, — красота, располагающая к миру, согласию и любви, а священно и важно то, что они сами выдумали, чтобы властвовать друг над другом.
ЛЕВ НИКОЛАЕВИЧ ТОЛСТОЙ, воскрешение (1899), Часть первая, глава первая
Though hundreds of thousands had done their very best to disfigure the small piece of land on which they were crowded together, by paving the ground with stones, scraping away every vestige of vegetation, cutting down the trees, turning away birds and beasts, and filling the air with the smoke of naphtha and coal, still spring was spring, even in the town. The sun shone warm, the air was balmy; everywhere, where it did not get scraped away, the grass revived and sprang up between the paving-stones as well as on the narrow strips of lawn on the boulevards. The birches, the poplars, and the wild cherry unfolded their gummy and fragrant leaves, the limes were expanding their opening buds; crows, sparrows, and pigeons, filled with the joy of spring, were getting their nests ready; the flies were buzzing along the walls, warmed by the sunshine. All were glad, the plants, the birds, the insects, and the children. But men, grown-up men and women, did not leave off cheating and tormenting themselves and each other. It was not this spring morning men thought sacred and worthy of consideration not the beauty of God’s world, given for a joy to all creatures, this beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony, and to love, but only their own devices for enslaving one another.
— Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection (1899), Part One, Chapter One; translated by Louise Maude
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.
For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. “The ship? Great God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;—at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
