Diary of a Mad Editor

I shampoo with a vitamin-enriching hair growth shampoo that neither enriches nor grows hair. It’s just my own personal vanity that I even try to have a head of hair like I had in my 20’s. Today, I gave up and shaved my head completely bald. I usually do this at the end of June and again just before the beginning of Autumn.

As I brought that electric razor down along my scalp, I thought about vanity as a literary device. Almost every writer that I know of deals with human vanity in one form or another in their writing. Shakespeare (pretty much everything he wrote), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray),  Jane Austen (Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice), Dostoevsky (The Idiot), Thackerey (Vanity Fair), Harry Crews (Body, The Mulching of America), etc.  Countless literary works written throughout the ages.  Our own vanity is very fertile ground for conflict, humor and characterization for creative writers.