“Self-publishing has an illustrious history. Milton published Areopagitica himself and Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. When he could not find a publisher for his first novel, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane published it himself. James Joyce in similar circumstances published Ulysses with the help of Sylvia Beach and her Shakespeare and Company bookshop. The Joy of Cooking was first published by its author and so were such recent best sellers as Richard Evans’s Christmas Box and Tom Peters’s In Search of Excellence.”

Jason Epstein in The New York Review of Books, February 10, 2011, p. 30.

Without putting myself in the ranks of the illustrious authors cited by Epstein, I can claim a modest place among the self-published. As of this date, my work has not yet found a company willing to take it on. Nor may that ever happen, despite continued efforts to place it with a publisher.

Nonetheless, my memoir has proven a source of pleasure for many family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues and others who have read it. That makes it doubly worthwhile to have written it: my own pleasure in writing it has produced  compound interest.

And I do share with these writers of English the same language and the exhilaration that comes from the skillful use of words, phrases, and other forms of expression. Like them I have struggled to write well, a struggle that has not rarely produced good results.

So it’s gratifying to have something in common, however limited, with the great writers and those not great but successful.