Irresponsible and Maladjusted: Essays

by Walter Cummins

“Irresponsible” and “maladjusted.” Those are the exact words the then-Governor of New Jersey, Robert B. Meyner, applied to me. Actually, his full statement about an editorial I had published in our student newspaper was, “an irresponsible article by a maladjusted boy.” As a died-in-the-wool existentialist, I accept that existence precedes essence. Who we are at any moment varies with the decisions we’ve just made. As the years piled up, I’ve had to make many. They’ve had the effect of being unwanted tests. Some I failed, others I passed, usually by the skin of my teeth, blundering into adequacy, my “I” in ongoing flux, a work in progress—or regress.

139 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 5, 2020

About the author

Walter Cummins has published six short story collections—Witness, Where We Live, Local Music, The End of the Circle, The Lost Ones, Habitat: stories of bent realism. More than 100 of his stories, as well as memoirs, essays, and reviews, have appeared in magazines, in book collections, and on the Web. For more than twenty years, he was editor of The Literary Review.