A Hall of Fame for Unknown Writers

After thirty-six years as book-editor in New York, Robin retires and moves back to her girlhood home in Oberlin, Ohio. She takes with her copies of items she had kept in a special file. The items had come not from literary agents but directly from writers, reflecting their quirky, original, creative, passionate, ironic, even bizarre voices. All the items enlighten and entertain. A Hall of Fame for Unknown Writers is Robin’s story as she reproduces the comic items and nominates them for induction into America’s first (and only) hall of fame for unknown writers, where the motto reads: “We’re in Kansas forevermore.” “For thirty-six years, I was an editor at a family-owned (now part of a bulky conglomerate) book-publishing house in New York. In retirement, I thought it might be enjoyable to write not the Great American Novel (my authors are trying to do that) but the Fun American Novel. Over the years, I had accumulated all sorts of material that I could weave into the novel: material that came to me directly from the country’s most unforgettable unknown writers and professors.” –Robin