FROM A DARKENED ROOM

The Inman Diary

EDITED BY DANIEL AARON


NEWS RELEASE:
Writer/Director Lorenzo Destefano Acquires Exclusive Dramatic Rights to the Inman Diary from Harvard University Press

"A fascinating document, by turns bizarre and illuminating, poignant and obscene...Delving into Inman's diary is like being able to eavesdrop on a conversation in a priest's confessional or psychotherapist's office...It also presents the social historian with a panorama of the twentieth century viewed from an exotic angle." --Michael Vincent Miller, New York Times

"A sometimes trenchant, sometimes caustic account of Inman's times." --Washington Times

Only a few of us seek immortality, and fewer still by writing. But Arthur Inman challenged the odds. He calculated that if he kept a diary and spared no thoughts or actions, was entirely honest and open, and did not care about damage or harm to himself or others, he would succeed in gaining attention beyond the grave that he could not attain in life.

The diary became a many-layered and strikingly animated work of a gifted writer, by turns charming, repellent, shocking, cruel, and comical. But the diary is also an uninhibited history of his times, of his eccentricities and fantasies, of his bizarre marriage arrangements and sexual adventures. Inman's explorations of his own troubled nature made him excessively curious about the secret lives of others. Like some ghostly doctor-priest, he chronicled their outpourings of head and heart as vividly as he did his own. The diary reads like a nonfiction novel as it moves inexorably toward disaster.

The 2-Volume Inman Diary
This is an abridged version of the celebrated two-volume work published by Harvard as
THE INMAN DIARY: A Public and Private Confession (Harvard).
Two-volume boxed set, 1600 pages, $65.00, ISBN: 0-674-45445-6
Daniel Aaron is Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University.
6 x 9 inches - 27 halftones/624 pages
ISBN 0-674-45443-X World price: $17.95 / £11.95 paper - History