FOR MANY YEARS I believed plagiarism was never an accident. The Web changed my mind, even though stealing by accident is still stealing and lying about it is a conscious act. That is tautological but I want to emphasize it.
While writing this book I was often online, checking my memory and old notes against infinite trails of information about the writers I had edited. I cruised their work looking for remembered passages and finding new ideas about what they had written. I made notes and collected fragments I thought would be useful to look at later—the way all journalists work to some degree on almost everything they write. The result, of course, is now something I am publishing as mine.
So in that way I am an aggregator, with many debts to what was written, reported and thought before. As a journalist, I want to pay those debts with full and proper credit, and I have tried to do that. But I was always aware that if I overlooked an appropriate acknowledgment or somehow conflated something I’d found into my own experience, what David Carr called the “self-cleaning tendencies of the Web” would indict me. I welcome the opportunity to correct any unintended sloppiness, however humiliating that may be.
As part of the checking, I also tracked down permission to run the longer quotes, and correspondences—including the letters from the Other Bob Sherrill. He had died, at home in his bed, in his little house on Cobb Street in Durham, North Carolina, in 2007. The last time anyone had seen him he was watching the Fourth of July fireworks from his front porch. A few days later his mail was piling up, and everyone knew that was not like him. Mail was important and he read it with the same editor’s eye and ear he used on everything. He liked to tell the story about how Tom Wolfe’s seminal 1963 piece, “There goes (VAROOM! VAROOM!) that Kandy Kolored (THPHHHHHH!) tangerine-flake streamline baby (RAHGHHHH!) around the bend (BRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM),” had been written as a letter to his editor, Byron Dobell, summarizing his notes when he was having trouble writing the story Esquire had assigned him about the custom-car culture in Southern California. Esquire used the first sentence as the headline, and ran the letter.
As for Bob’s letters, I saved them like the artifacts they are, and they traveled with me to thirteen magazines over thirty years. Reading them one day in 2012 when I was packing up my files to leave Time Inc. tripped me into thinking I could write this book. Bob would have made it better, especially if I wanted any of it to be about letting life happen to you, regardless of the pain and so on but with its soaring joy. Impossible to fact-check, but knowable as true.