D. G. Myers, a celebrated literary critic, professor and blogger, died quietly of cancer in late September. For many like me who only knew D. G. Myers through his writings and online presence, his death was no surprise. We had read about it on A Commonplace Blog or in Time magazine, or in his much-praised podcast for the Library of Economics and Liberty just a few months before he died.

As his cancer worsened, D. G. Myers also expressed his feelings in occasional bursts on his beautiful Twitter account. Always a writer first, his tweets were unfailingly elegant, measured and dignified. Even when he could only manage bitter humor and wry regret for his family’s shared suffering as he tweeted his way through chemotherapy during his last weeks on Earth:

D. G. Myers accomplished many impressive things during his literary life: he was a celebrated professor, wrote a book about the history of creative writing programs called The Elephants Teach, was a columnist for Commentary magazine until he got ceremoniously fired for supporting gay marriage. But his online writings and tweets should be numbered among his works. I’ve extracted just a few samples from his final month to pay tribute to D. G. Myers.

In his last month, Myers knew that he was about to die, and shared this fact with us. He expressed himself often with a bitter sense of humor about the terrible injustice he felt at his own fate: a vigorous man in his early sixties, a father of a close family with young children, a man with so many more books he wanted to read before he died. Myers never raged, because he was too proud a critic to lose his temper, but he also did not go gentle.

He interacted often with other tweeters (including myself), and had a natural, easygoing online voice. Occasionally, he’d offer a raw opinion:

He’d tweet about his struggles to collect his writings before he died, and about the indignities that faced a literary writer who had lost all commercial potential:

He’d tweet about baseball, or writing, or his wife and children, or Israel, or any combination thereof:

Or he’d paint a picture:

Or another:

Sometimes (especially when the physical pain seemed to be getting to him) he seemed to be tweeting koans:

D. G. Myers’s religiosity made him unique as a cancer memoirist. He was a devout Jew, and his unabashed enthusiasm for religion clearly gave him strength. He spoke up often on behalf of conservative positions, most of which I disagreed with him about, but I always sensed that he favored conservativism because he favored traditional religion.

Judaism appeared to be one of his major areas of knowledge, and his Biblical and Talmudic inspirations enriched his writing. It certainly also helped him cope with his disease, bestowing upon him a placid and philosophical attitude that was probably alien to his argumentative nature. At least, he must have understood, he didn’t have it as bad as Job.

A Jewish son makes a father very proud right here. These might be his best tweets ever:

Or this one might be. It’s the one I’ll remember the most:

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I had a few wonderful interactions with D. G. Myers via our blogs or Twitter. Philip Roth was his favorite novelist, and in 2010 I wrote a smart-ass consideration of Philip Roth. I was very surprised when D. G. Myers called it “a spectacular read”. I was actually hoping he wouldn’t read it, because I didn’t think it would meet his standards. I’ve rarely felt more honored than by this tweet.

Later, D. G. Myers and I discovered that we had an obscure favorite in common: Richard P. Brickner, who had been my writing workshop teacher at the New School. Myers believed that Brickners’s 1981 novel Tickets was an unheralded masterpiece of the 1980s, and I agreed. I’ve never met anyone else who’s even heard of this book.

D. G. Myers and I also shared an interest in the postmodern fiction of the 1960s, though his knowledge of the era is much more scholarly than my own.

Thank you for the photo at the top of the page to Gil Roth of Chimera Obscura, who had the honor of taking the picture that Myers chose for his last Twitter profile. You can listen to the Chimera Obscura/Virtual Memories podcast with D. G. Myers here.