Small-minded people at Wikipedia

Wikipedia removed my biographical entry. They claimed that “the article was too specialized to be of universal interest.” Though they had the chance to be the first encyclopedia to contain the biography of a previously unknown, soon to be major talent, they were too short-sighted to recognize it. Their loss. I have pasted the contents of the Wikipedia entry below for your convenience.

West, Daniel. (1982-present)

Daniel West is the pseudonym of the young American writer of the weblog Collected Real-time Works of a Major American Writer. While his work is essentially journalistic in nature, the scope of his interest and the tone of his writing will place his work alongside that of Mark Twain, Joan Didion, Lester Bangs, and Ann Coulter as a Major American Writer. While West has been accused of what is seen by many as the shamelessly self-indulgent solipsism of the sort the blogosphere has made possible, his work transcends mere blogging.

Early Years

West was born in 1982 in the Grand Forks Air Force Base Hospital. His father was a sergeant, and his mother was a 19 year-old high school dropout. West was the second child, following his older brother by a year and 8 months. Both his parents converted to the Independent Fundamental Baptist faith when West was an infant, and shortly became heavily involved in the church. West learned to read and write at the age of three, when he sat in on his older brother’s homeschooling sessions. Among his earliest memories from this time is a visit to the printing presses of the Grand Forks Herald, where his father worked overnight on the loading docks. After the birth of his younger sister, in 1988, the family moved to Sayville, on Long Island in New York, to work in an Independent Fundamental Baptist Church.

Education and adolescence

West attended school at the First Baptist Christian Academy, which was made up of a principal (West’s father, who also found full-time work as a home health aide), a teacher (the only accredited college graduate in the congregation),12 students, and fold-up desks that bolted to the wall in the basement of the First Baptist Church of Sayville. He repeated 2nd grade because he had completed 1st and 2nd grade in the year that he was in 1st grade, and the teacher did not know what else to do. West read voraciously at this time, Twain, Melville and Hawthorne became particular favorites, as well as the King James Version of the Bible, the daily reading of which was mandated by his parents.
Following a crisis of religious faith for West’s father, the family moved twice in five years, although West’s mother remained in the church, working full-time as an administrator for the church. The family still attended church Sunday morning and evenings and Wednesday evenings, except for several weeks in the summer time, when they attended every evening, for revival meeting. West also continued attending First Baptist Christian Academy, which by this time had at least twenty students.
The family was in tight financial circumstances at this time, and West’s father took a newspaper delivery route to supplement the family’s income. In a now lost auto-biographical manuscript, West recalled rising at 4:30 every morning to deliver New York Newsday with his father and his brother, except Sundays, when they rose at 5:30. West has said that this contact with newspapers was a huge influence in his perception of the world of information, which was in tension with the limiting fundamentalist teachings of the church. From the time he was 14 years old, West also worked in the summer as a landscape laborer, and later as a carpenter’s helper, all over Long Island. West was also deeply involved in preparing for publication, printing, assembling and mailing, two newsletters which the church published, Valiant for Truth- for fundamentalist preachers, and Apples of Gold- for fundamentalist women.
West traveled with a church youth group to St. Louis several times during this period for summer camps and Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Conferences during this period, as one of the other Independent Fundamentalist Baptist churches in the country was located in St. Louis.
Although West had made several professions of religious faith as a child, he had become deeply skeptical of the church by the time he was 16 years old. While he remained outwardly submissive to the demands of fundamentalism, he planned to attend a secular university and pursue what he perceived as a more normal life for himself. When his SAT scores placed him in the top 5 percent of students in 2000, West applied to New York University, where he was accepted in spite of being expelled for vague reasons from First Baptist Christian Academy, which by this time had no less than 30 students. West holds a General Equivalency Diploma (GED) from the New York State Board of Regents

New York University

West attended NYU as a commuter student on a generous scholarship. His parents insisted that he live at home while attending college in order to minimize the opportunities West would have to commit sins. West did sin several times, however, and his father forced him to move out of the house, at which time West lived on the couches of newly-made sympathetic acquaintances who were sympathetic to his plight. A brief reconciliation ended with an argument over how West should cite the Bible in a Foundations of Western Civilization Survey paper. West’s father took the position that the Bible should be cited as God’s Literal Inerrant Word to humankind, while West thought it important, for the sake of his grades ,and as his own intellectual choice, that he should cite the Bible as a literary work. West was dropped off at the train station with everything he owned in a duffel bag and a backpack. He stayed on the floor at the apartment of two friends he’d met at his job, where, between classes, he was working full-time writing copy and doing marketing work for a lighting design company near campus. He often slept in the library as well. West finished his freshman year with 28 credits, a passing GPA, and thousands of dollars in debt (his parents refused to co-sign loans, and credit cards were easy to come by for a college freshman). West also traveled to Las Vegas, Chicago, and High Point, North Carolina at this time.

September 2001

By September 2001, after working for a time as in sales of mid-century modern furniture at ABC Carpet and Home, West had found work as an overnight elevator operator in an apartment building, a job which, although less exciting than marketing, afforded him time to read. He moved to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, when his brother, working at Quick and Reilly across Broadway, was nearly killed. The events of September 11th, combined with the difficulties of the previous year, threw West into a deep depression. For several years West was capable of little more than showing up for work, where he would read works by Foucault, Marx, Camus, Rimbaud, Henry Miller, Neal Stephenson and Irvine Welsh until dawn, distributing the morning papers, then bicycling back to Flatbush, Brooklyn where he lived near Prospect Park. Most days he sat in his room playing the guitar, rarely sleeping. West also wrote poetry, songs, and a short experimental work of fiction at this time. These works were burned by West in a moment of harsh self-criticism and despair. This incident was recounted in the now-lost memoir titled Moments of Harsh Self-criticism and Despair. West also traveled to Montreal, Arkansas, and the Dominican Republic during this time.

Present

West enrolled at Hunter College in 2005, when his depression began to lift after treatment by psychotherapy and anti-depressant medication. While keeping his full-time job as an elevator operator, he amassed the bulk of the credits necessary to a bachelor’s degree. West transferred in 2007 to the Bernard Baruch School of Business, where he is in the American Studies Program. West currently lives in the Wyckoff Heights section of Bushwick, Brooklyn, and publishes the weblog The Collected Real-Time Works of a Major American Writer. He is often seen bicycling in and around New York City, and less often, busking with his guitar in subway stations.