The Foxcroft correspondence consisted largely of letters to agents, letters to authors, letters to would-be authors, and an occasional letter to a reviewer, complaining about an unfavorable notice of one of Parker’s books. “Hardly the sort of stuff to interest the National Archives,” I said to Poole. “Or even Parker’s alma mater, which I believe was Duke.” As we dug deeper, however, and particularly when we tackled the computer files, a picture of Parker Foxcroft as an editorial Vlad the Impaler began to emerge. “You have shown the unparalleled effrontery to attempt a life of James Joyce,” he wrote one scholar, “when you ought to know, if you have read the literature, that Richard Ellmann’s biography is monumental, and will not be superseded in our lifetime, not by plodding academic hackwork such as you have produced. It’s not even a creditable rip-off of Ellmann.” And: “Do not have the audacity to dream that I would put my imprint on a shoddy piece of keyhole-peeping such as this one,”
