Impressions Thanks for the Imprints section in the Oct. 13 issue. I really enjoyed it. In fact, he hardly aspired to anything at all. Kennedy's preference for Charles Bukowski doesn't mention any influence that Miller's work admittedly had on Bukowski when he was just starting out. All writers drop names.
All writers inflate their worth.
It's interesting how subverted or adopted he's become. Hollywood, France, Allen Ginsberg's Beat Poets, and sexual libertarians all claim him as their own. When feminists attacked Miller in the 1970s, Norman Mailer and Erica Jong championed his cause. He was poetic and an artist, everything that an industrious American is not supposed to be. Stubbornness and laughing at misfortune kept his active imagination thriving.