• Robert Shields
    Writing

    Robert Shields, Obsessive Diarist

    In an earlier post, I wrote about Herman Melville, who wrote a letter to his friend, wishing that he had a paper mill in his house so that his letter could literally be never ending.  Robert Shields could very well have benefited from such an arrangement, when at the time of his death, he had chronicled the details of his life in five minute intervals from 1972 to 1997. “Reverend Robert Shields (May 17, 1918 – October 15, 2007) was a former Minister and high school English teacher who lived in Dayton, Washington, USA, who, after his death, left behind a diary of 37.5 million words chronicling every five minutes…