A Reader, A Writer, A Novel

He exists in his writing the same way that other people of that era exist in the hazy daguerreotype that seems to be marked that a whole history, not only in the faces held still too long to hide much of the visage's life history and true sentiments, but also in the process itself, a conglomeration of precious metals, deadly chemicals poorly understood and the ingenuity of a rogue inventor's population. There isn't a picture of him to be had, nor a true word one might easily assume. Throwing his own writing straight out the window as any kind of true account, we're left with only that which was written of him in his already infamy. And the recollections of those who knew him before infamy. Usually tinged with more than the standard level of coattail riding criticism. Something more like a mass confusion about anything like his true character--if we haven't be thoroughly disabused of that concept in his own writing--permanently mired in the æther that surrounded his own self-presentation, so important especially to his early "journalistic" work.