Arthur Crew Inman arrives in Boston.

The Atlanta native moves into an apartment that he rarely leaves at Garrison Hall at 8 Garrison Street, and begins keeping the 155-volume, 17-million-word diary that he maintains until his death. The wealthy recluse hires “talkers,” many of them young women, who read to him and tell him about their lives. Upset by the the construction noise from the nearby Prudential Center, he moves to Brookline (“I am a turtle which has lost his carapace,” he writes) and commits suicide in 1963. A two-volume edition of his diary is published in 1985.*