FG is "Greatest Unknown Novelist"

[Mulboyne]

[floatr][/floatr]Edward Whittemore has been described by Publisher's Weekly as "America's best unknown novelist.". According to his Yale colleague and literary agent, Tom Wallace, Whittemore went on a tour of duty in Japan with the Marines where he was approached by the CIA. After a crash course in Japanese, he worked with the agency in the Far East from around 1958 to 1967. By one account, his cover was posing as a journalist at the Japan Times. Whether it was the influence of Japan or his work with the intelligence services, Whittemore became "the kind of drinker who wanted to crawl inside the fifth to lick it completely clean" and had a string of failed relationships. He wrote two books while in Japan: one about Go, the other about a young American expatriate living in Tokyo. Neither was published. He started writing again years later while in the Middle East but still drawing on his experience in Asia. His first book, Quin's Shanghai Circus, opens with the line "Some twenty years after the end of the war with Japan a freighter arrived in Brooklyn with the largest collection of Japanese pornography ever assembled in a Western tongue". Critics compared his work with Pynchon and Vonnegut but the books didn't sell. Whittemore died largely unknown and penniless in 1995.

[Taro Toporific]

....He wrote two books while in Japan: one about Go, the other about a young American expatriate living in Tokyo. Neither was published.... Whittemore died largely unknown and penniless in 1995.

Ahhhh, Japan. The resume hole.