Volume 32, Number 15 · October 10, 1985
Telling All
By Louis S. Auchincloss
The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession
by Arthur Inman, edited by Daniel Aaron
Harvard University Press, 1661 pp., $50.00 thereafter
When Arthur Inman committed suicide in 1963, aged sixty-eight, in the apartment hotel in Boston's Back Bay where he had lived, an invalid and semirecluse, since 1919, he was known, if at all, only as the author of a few volumes of sentimental poetry. He left behind him, however, a formidable bid for literary immortality: 17 million words of a combined journal and memoir which he hoped would constitute nothing less than a history of his times. His trustees were authorized to show the work to Harvard and to arrange for its publication in some edited form with the financial assistance of his estate. Twenty-two years later, as a result of the indefatigable labors of Daniel Aaron, Harvard University Press has issued the two bulky volumes of what it calls the author's 'public and private confession.'
Review, 2498 words
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