So many people are dying around me that I begin to worry about what people might say about me when I die. What if someone looked in the New York TIMES for a good quotation and found that Richard Brodhead said I simply made up POEMS (1860), something no one else had heard of. Well, Raymond Weaver did not know about it in 1921 but the next year Meade Minnigerode told us almost all that is now known about POEMS, which was quite real. Brodhead's ignorance (if it was not malice) goes uncorrected in the New York TIMES. Andrew Delbanco's critical biography 2005 mentions both THE ISLE OF THE CROSS (1853) and POEMS (1860) which he said in the NEW REPUBLIC that I had invented. Curiously, his uncorrected proofs did not mention that I had written a two-volume biography. How had he learned that I had not invented these two lost books and where did he rush to apologize?
No, if there is an obit for me someone who knows only Brodhead and Delbanco may repeat the slander.
I am working on the MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE right now and thinking about the impossibility of killing a lie.
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