In the first days of spring in his eightysecond year Gerald Murnaneperhaps the greatest living writer of English prosebegan a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. He would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary filing cabinets in the Chronological Archive which documents his life as a whole and the Literary Archive which is devoted to everything he has written. As the repor