And now for something completely unrelated ...

[Dave Monroe]

... to Pynchon, that is (and no wisecracks from the Peanut Gallery
...).  A friend asked me to suggest biographies, autobiographies,
memoirs, diaries, correspondences, and so forth, or excerpts therefrom,
that he might use in teaching a freshman composition class.  As
exemplars not only of style but of form, I'm presumiong, but ...

Now, of course, the definitive Pynchon biography is well over the
horizon, and the jury is still out on that correspondence, but ... but
my impulse was to name the obvious, canonical examples--The Education of
Henry Adams, The Autobiographies of Benvenuto Cellini and Benjamin
Franklin and Frederick Douglass and Alice B. Toklas and Malcolm X, The
Diary of Anne Frank, The Confessions of St. Augustine and Rousseau--some
canonical countercanonical forms such as slave and captivity narratives,
some more contemporary examples such as Art Spiegelman's Maus (I and
II), The Collected Works of Harvey Pekar, The Correspondence of Francois
Truffaut (which a freind loves because it's so boringly quotidian) or
Dave Eggers' A Mindnumbing Work of Staggering Pretension (and, alas,
biographically, at LEAST, I AM the evil antimatter DE)--but ...

But I figured you all, as you do on nigh unto anything else, might have
a few suggestions, opinions, even, on the topic.  Informed, relaible, of
course.  Feel free to respond directly to my e-mail if you don't want to
clutter Th' List (though I certainly don't mind a freindly round of
gettin' to know each other thru lit'rachure, but, tehn again, I'm not
hosting this little soiree on my server, so ...).  Any and all
suggestions, comments, will be greatly appreciated and forwarded
anonymously (so don't worry about any unsolicied e-mail) ...