Has anyone ever self-published a book? I have published many books and have won awards. I am on the Pulitzer list and two times I won the top PROSE award from the Association of American Publishers. The book I have recently finished is a product of genealogical and historical research. This means research into episodes of American history in which cousins or sometimes direct ancestors of mine took part, often in unexpectedly significant ways. The chapters all deal with kinfolks of mine from the 1600s onward but mainly in 1700s and 1800s and into the 1900s and a little in the 2000s. They all deal with significant historical events such as the thrust westward, the Civil War, Reconstruction, mistreatment of Indians, the corruption of the Choctaw governors in Indian Territory, the bravery of a slave family (Black Costners), the ignorant racism of a cousin who caused the great Houston riot of 1917 and the killing and imprisonment of Buffalo Soldiers. Two chapters deal with the massacre of an Arkansas wagon train in which several of my cousins were bound for California.
I am a real scholar. Harrison Hayford, the treat Melvillean, in 1996 for the first volume of my biography of Melville called me (on the dust jacket) "quite simply the most important Melville scholar of all time." Most of my early research was in the great libraries. In my work on AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS I have sat in my chair here in Morro Bay writing a lot on Melville still, as I did in the east, up through 2019 when the Library of America volume was published. Since 2002 in stolen time I have become a genealogist just for my family, whom were almost totally unknown to me.
I joined all the newspaper archive sites, one by one, as I saw I needed more. I found ways of reading political and genealogical articles I needed. I wrote to state archives when I had to. But I did not go to archives as I had done in the 1900s. Yet I have an archive of over ten thousand documents in one computer file. The world has changed.
I have also been reading books on American history. I am trying to put a jpg photograph here. It will not include many TALL BOOKS such as county histories. FRUSTRATING--My jpg is being rejected. Here, the wall of shorter books.
University presses these days all seem to be overstaffed to begin with. Why, at a cocktail party in LA Jerry Graff asked what I was writing and I told him and he said he wanted it for Northwestern University Press and a couple of years later I gave it to him, FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS (1984). Now you are asked to send multiple copies to chiefs and underlings so they can send them to the crew who looks for typos and then with all the original, carefully preserved spellings removed the work goes to massively enlarged WOKE committee and by that time the elderly author it totally senile or dead and the press has to hire additional staff.
I'll be 88 this fall. It's astonishing that I finished the book, given the assaults on my health since 200, but here it is. A dear friend died last week at 88, ten months older than me. I will not be able to "submit" the book to anyone who will welcome it, I guess.
And I am reminded that the editor of Melville journal in this century devised a fiendish application process invented in a Bondage and Discipline coven. You had to submit, and submit, and submit.
Where is Jerry Graff when I need him? Surprise surprise, Google says he is still alive! Born in 1937 and still alive! Well, I guess he can't help.
Now who has self-published who can tell me what he or she went through. Did they submit even more insultingly as they would have to do to abase themselves before the Woke tyrants? Have you ever tried to dictate on Microsoft 11, copying a historical text, then see that words have been replaced with ***** ***** etc.? I have a step great grandfather who comes out as William *****. Trained at Microsoft 11, they are hired at university presses?
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