We are all in this for the sake of writing.  Good writing.  It is priceless.  Lest we forget, the names Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Phillip Roth, Erica Jong, Updike, Kerouac, and a host of unforgettable others must haunt us.  Forgive me if I never found Hemingway that thrilling.  Nor did I appreciate many foreign born writers, Camus being an exception.  Perhaps lost in translation.  Let us proceed to honor the writer, myself among them, as struggling human beings on the verge of personal extinction seeking salvation in the written page, rarely certain of its veracity.