The Man Who Could Not Fail

Timothy Dexter left school at eight, apprenticed to a leather dresser, and married a widow for her money. He had no education, no connections, and no particular talents. What he had was luck so relentless it looked like genius.

They told him to ship bed warmers to the West Indies, where it never dropped below seventy degrees. His captain sold them as molasses ladles at a handsome profit. They told him to ship coal to Newcastle — the coal capital of England. He arrived during a miners' strike and sold every last piece at a premium. He speculated on worthless Continental currency because he'd seen John Hancock do it; when Alexander Hamilton's financial plan redeemed the notes at par, Dexter became one of the richest men in New England.

He appointed himself "Lord," erected forty wooden statues of famous men in his garden — Washington, Jefferson, Napoleon, and himself — and held a government title called "Informer of Deer" for twelve years in a town with no deer. He staged his own funeral, drew three thousand mourners, then ruined it by caning his wife for not crying hard enough.

Then he wrote a book. A Pickle for the Knowing Ones ran 8,847 words with no punctuation whatsoever. When readers complained, he published a second edition with a page of commas, periods, and exclamation marks dumped at the back, instructing them to "peper and solt it as they plese."

In 1890, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote in The Atlantic that Emerson and Whitman must yield the claim of declaring American literary independence to Lord Timothy Dexter.

The man who couldn't punctuate a sentence had won American letters.