Thoughts after twice having online (webzine) pieces on the American Revolution cited in new books.

Thoughts after twice having online (webzine) pieces on the American Revolution cited in new printed and bound books.

I was a railroad telegrapher through the 1950s but that turned into a dead end job when American Morse was no longer good enough for communication.

Retooling myself, I got a job as a university professor and became a textual scholar until Fredson Bowers blackballed me from the Center for Scholarly Editions and lied about doing so. A major piece of work on Stephen Crane went unpublished for 2 decades and when it came out, in another continent, it could not do the good it might have done.

Again picking myself up, I became a Melville biographer, but Richard Brodhead and Andrew Delbanco said (falsely) that I had made up POEMS (1860); Delbanco said because I had invented THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS I could not be trusted anywhere in either volume. Critics following them carry on their mission.

Beaten down, finally, I became a historian of the American Revolution.

Almost in some moods I feel as if the telegrapher was my great grandfather, the textual scholar my grandfather, the biographer my father, and the Revolutionary historian what is left of me.