Thoreau once observed that "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." That may be true, but most people's lives are spent active in some form of popularity contest, tempered by job conviction and rank, in competition or corruption with the Other, but usually without fundamentally understanding the mysterious complicity of literature in their own cogency. Writer's have approached their craft from many walks of life. But usually, the gifted writer is one whose obsessive compulsion to break free of the bondage maintained by the fuzzy and the frittered, the obscure and the mundane events of a specific time and culture that the signals of revolt urge many a writer's pursuit to write. Each of the writers on the TLC list lived up to the task. A few died with the fight still on their breath, but they each left their marks in the sand of time—a body of literary work which speaks not only of their specific age, but very often, to our own times even more profoundly. Yes, the struggle continues.