From a Darkened Room

The Inman Diary

Arthur C. Inman

Edited by Daniel Aaron

    THE INMAN DIARIES
    a chamber opera by Thomas Oboe Lee
    based on the life and writings of Arthur Crew Inman

    and on the play Visitations by Lorenzo DeStefano

    INTERMEZZO NEW ENGLAND CHAMBER OPERA SERIES
    September 14-16, 2007
    Tower Auditorium Theatre
    Massachusetts College of Art
    621 Huntington Avenue
    Boston, MA
    617-899-4261 for further information
    produced with the cooperation of Harvard University Press

    Only a few of us seek immortality, and fewer still by writing. But Arthur Inman challenged the odds. He calculated that if he kept a diary and spared no thoughts or actions, was entirely honest and open, and did not care about damage or harm to himself or others, he would succeed in gaining attention beyond the grave that he could not attain in life.

    The diary became a many-layered and strikingly animated work of a gifted writer, by turns charming, repellent, shocking, cruel, and comical. But the diary is also an uninhibited history of his times, of his eccentricities and fantasies, of his bizarre marriage arrangements and sexual adventures. Inman's explorations of his own troubled nature made him excessively curious about the secret lives of others. Like some ghostly doctor-priest, he chronicled their outpourings of head and heart as vividly as he did his own. The diary reads like a nonfiction novel as it moves inexorably toward disaster.

    This is an abridged version of the celebrated two-volume work published by Harvard as
    The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession.

  • Cover: From a Darkened Room

Daniel Aaron is Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University.