Man of Letters: A Summing Up is a series of three books about Cacoëthes Scribendi, an underground writer, like Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, ’Tis, and Teacher Man, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit, or Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody?, My Dream of You, and Almost There.
Or maybe they are
like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer,
Tropic of Capricorn, and Black Spring,
Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Castle to Castle, Rigadoon, and North, or Frederick Exley’s
A Fan’s Notes, Pages From
a
Three related books, posted daily, as they were written, on the worldwide web.
Sort of like Larry McMurtry’s Books, Literary Life, and Hollywood, except Scrib is an unemployed technical writer whose last job was a three-month temporary economic-stimulus-program grant writing training programs for the unemployed, for a defense contractor, that ran out.
His unemployment ran out before that. It’s still out. It’s not coming back.
The American dream is not coming back.
That’s what Man of Letters: A Summing Up, is about. The death of the American dream.
It is satire.
Satire uses irony.
Scrib snatches victory from the jaws of defeat.
What victory is that?
He finishes the book.
This was not an easy book to write, you know. If you think it’s easy, try it. See if you can do better.
4th of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas. New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Day, Black History Month.
Scrib writes every day.
Holidays are for working.
Writing is work.
How do you do it if you don’t get paid to do it?
Man of Letters: A Summing Up answers that question. It shows how.