A Collection of Famous Last Letters

Reading A Collection of Famous Last Letters is similar to the experience of walking through any modem city park and discovering its dichotomous cast of characters: the inspired and the desperate; the wanting and the lacking; the about-to­ be's or the up-and-coming and the has-been's, the also-ran's, or worse, the never­ were's. In the center of this novel stands a great towering character, the biographer Culpepper who has spent the better part of his adult life memorializing the life-stories of these park-dwellers. But the biographer now demands his biography to be written- a search for the "straight line" - at any cost to secure his legacy in the pantheon of the famed and the infamous.