BOOK REVIEW EXCERPTS

“A fascinating document by turns poignant, bizarre and illuminating. Delving into Inman’s diary is like being able to eavesdrop on a conversation in a priest’s confessional
or psychotherapist’s office. You see what outwardly respectable people have been doing behind closed doors; Inman plucks all their skeletons out of the closets and parades them before our eyes against a backdrop of news bulletins and editorial commentary on world events, political elections, changing styles and fashions.” – NEW YORK TIMES

“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 semi recluse, 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.”  – NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

“After all these years, Arthur Inman is famous. Not only is his work being read more widely than even the publisher dreamed, but he has become a national celebrity of sorts,
as ‘that weird guy in the darkened room.’…… This diary is one of the strangest documents of autobiography ever written by anyone.” – WASHINGTON POST

“One of the most bizarre literary endeavors of the 20th century.”
 THE BOSTON GLOBE

“By including the hopes and dreams of the anonymous shopgirls and clerks and travelling salesmen who responded to his lure in great numbers,
Inman broadened the scope of his work without a thought for social rank or educational accomplishment.
What interested him most was a cracking good story well told, the effluvia of lives he could barely imagine on his own.” – THE GUARDIAN

“This compelling work is many things: a case history of a deeply troubled man; the story of a transplanted and self-conscious southerner; a historical overview of Boston illuminated with striking cityscapes; an odd sort of American social history. But chiefly it is, as Inman himself came to see, a gigantic nonfiction novel, a new literary form.
As it moves inexorably toward a powerful denouement, The Inman Diary is an addictive narrative.” – AMAZON

“The Inman Diary discloses aspects of American life only sporadically touched up in contemporary fiction.”   TIME