In Reports of My Death: Beyond-the-Grave Confessions of North American Writers, author Gerry Christmas taps into a literary limbo where he relives the lives of writers in an endless cycle of introspection. Sixty-five ?autobiographies? tell you ? How Mark Twain Americanized the English language and put a human face on the slave trade. How Edgar Allan Poe came up with the basic theory of relativity fifty years before Albert Einstein. How Walt Whitman used his poetic genius to make people more loving and less homophobic. How Emily Dickinson did not live a life devoid of adventure and romance. How Henry David Thoreau inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. How Herman Melville anticipated the thoughts and ideas of Sigmund Freud. How Kate Chopin portrayed adultery with a sympathetic eye and was ostracized for doing so.