I started out simply spurred by the thrill of finding long-forgotten books and I started NeglectedBooks.com to share some of my discoveries. But I soon learned that behind every neglected book is a life worth discovering and celebrating, too. Here are some of the stories I’ve been privileged to tell:
- Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist
- Raised in circumstances of abject poverty, Kathleen Sully began writing novels in her forties—stories of violence, poverty, eccentricities, and stubborn originality. After initial acclaim, her followership dwindled, and she returned to a hard life, now as carer for her schizophrenic son. A writer still awaiting her deserved recognition.
- Peter Greave’s Secrets
- Born Gerald Wilkinson in Bombay in 1910, raised Gerald Carberry by a father often on the run from his creditors and the law, Peter Greave (his pseudonym) contracted leprosy in the late 1930s and spent much of World War II in the slums of Calcutta suffering in squalor until he was brought to live at the last home for lepers in England. Though his memoirs are colorful and candid, I discovered more secrets to his story when I read through his surviving diaries.
- The Tragedies of Isabel Bolton
- Mary Britton Miller lost her parents to illness at the age of three. At 14, she watched her identical twin sister, Grace, drown when their rowboat overturned. Then, in her sixties, she published three novels as Isabel Bolton that earned her praise as “the best woman writer of fiction in this country today.” Yet her social comedies hid a vein of tragedy that marked her entire life.
- Raymond Souster, the Bard of Toronto
- Almost every day of his adult life—for over 80 years—Raymond Souster wrote poetry about his home town of Toronto, its people, its nature, and its history. The fifty-some collections of poems that he published represent a unique record of one city’s life, almost an impressionistic diary of one urban life in the 20th Century.
- Herbert Clyde Lewis and the Rescue of Gentleman Overboard
- Back in 2009, I wrote about a forgotten little novel from 1937 about a man who falls off a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Now, almost 90 years later, Gentleman Overboard is becoming a global phenomenon, translated into ten different languages and adapted into one-person plays in Switzerland and Italy. This is the story of its author, who fell out of his own life and disappeared thinking he would never be read again.
- What to Make of Rod McKuen?
- Rod McKuen was one of the most successful writers of his time, and certainly its best-selling poet. But how much of his life and his work was a sham? The answer turns out to be more complicated than you might imagine.
- The Mystery of Jessamy Morrison — and its Solution
- Jessamy Morrison published six novels about odd and unconventional sexual relationships in England in the 1960s. But who exactly was Jessamy Morrison? With the help of a couple other sleuths, I was able to identify the unexpected man behind her work: the Anglo-Hungarian novelist Peter de Polnay.
- The Longest Novel Ever Written?
- Adele Garrison wrote a novel called Revelations of a Wife over the course of forty years, a total work estimated at over 13 million words. And the reason you’ve never heard of her, or it, is because virtually none of her novel has ever been published in book form. Revelations of a Wife was a newspaper serial.
- Eda Lord, Writing in the Margins
- The American writer Eda Lord met Sybille Bedford, a German writer, in the early 1930s and they began a long-term relationship. But when Bedford fled to America, leaving Lord behind to survive the Nazi occupation of France, it cast a shadow that haunted Lord for the rest of her life.