In Reports of My Death: Beyond-the-Grave Confessions of North American Writers, author Gerry Christmas taps into a literary limbo where he relives the lives of writers in an endless cycle of introspection. Sixty-five “autobiographies” tell you … • How Mark Twain Americanized the English language and put a human face on the slave trade. • How Edgar Allan Poe came up with the basic theory of relativity fifty years before Albert Einstein. • How Walt Whitman used his poetic genius to make people more loving and less homophobic. • How Emily Dickinson did not live a life devoid of adventure and romance. • How Henry David Thoreau inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. • How Herman Melville anticipated the thoughts and ideas of Sigmund Freud. • How Kate Chopin portrayed adultery with a sympathetic eye and was ostracized for doing so.
By Gerry Christmas