Arthur Crew Inman

Arthur Crew Inman (May 11, 1895 – December 5, 1963) was a reclusive and unsuccessful American poet whose 17-million word diary, extending from 1919 to 1963, is one of the longest English language diaries on record.

Inman was born May 11, 1895 in Atlanta to one of the city's wealthiest families. His father Samuel Martin Inman owned part of the Atlanta Constitution but derived his wealth from cotton trade and manufacturing.

He left Atlanta to attend the Haverford School and then Haverford College leaving college after 2 years because of a nervous breakdown, and he never returned to the South after 1915.

He married Evelyn Yates in 1923.

Inman published several volumes of undistinguished poetry. A critic has described Inman as "a mediocre talent, wholly lacking in the sophisticated literary and philosophical education of the Ransom generation."

In 1928 he edited and published Soldier of the South: General Pickett's War Letters to his Wife.

He moved to Boston, where he became increasingly obsessed with his health. He lived for much of his life in dark, soundproofed apartments. He owned several apartments in order to surround himself with noiseless spaces. Having inherited wealth, he was able to cater to his hypochondria and other eccentric ways and afford servants and others hired to come and talk with him. His wife, Evelyn, appears to have accepted that he would have sex with some of these so-called "talkers." He attempted suicide on several occasions. On December 5, 1963, when he found the noise from the construction of the Prudential Tower near his apartment unbearable, he committed suicide with a revolver in Brookline, Massachusetts. According to one theory, he suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy and may have been experiencing aspects of reality that the normal brain filters out.

He left 155 handwritten volumes of the diary when he died, entirely unpublished. Inman's diary is not only considered unique by some but historian David Herbert Donald called it "the most remarkable diary ever published by an American." Through its many volumes, Inman provides a panoramic record of people, events, and observations from more than four decades of the twentieth century. The extent of his writing suggests he suffered from hypergraphia.

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