About Daniel McNeill

In all my writings I try to create what we Americans really feel and think as opposed to what we are supposed to feel and think. I believe in culture and culture is nothing more and nothing less than finding some means to meet soul to soul with the deepest creative thoughts and feelings of another person. I am sometimes shocked at expressions of American culture because of their superficiality. Culture is life, a necessary and true part of life even if most Americans kill what is worthwhile in themselves with their superficial lives and kill culture at the same time. At the roots of our history and our common experiences as Americans lie meanings about our lives that words, thoughts, inspiration, beauty, poetry can make shine forth as noble and true. We are not the people that we usually represent ourselves to be. We are much more and it is a public shame that the instruments of our culture - films, books, music, paintings, and other medias- often fail completely to touch the heart of what we really are and also what we should be. I don't care that my three books fail to express the full complexity of American thought and experience because I tried my best to express truthfully the small part of it that I could express. I tried to put all of American history into my book, The United States of the World. I failed but in my twelve essays about the most important periods of our history, I at least reached what was fundamental in them truthfully. In my book, The Theater of the Impossible, I wrote every word with the deep desire to give finally a silent game that I love a voice. I made baseball speak. Our national pastime tells us that it expresses much more about our religion and the way we earn our living than we have ever noticed in it. My book says that we watch baseball games like blind men and do not see what is going on. In my novel, The End of All Beginnings, I tested whether two beings who do not fit nicely into normal American life can live together abnormally and in revolt without causing their union to end unhappily. I am a writer who looks for everything that is possible in America and brings to the surface very important unusual bits as best he can.