This unique American author died in 1999 at age 55 while seemingly recovering from abdominal surgery.

He's the closest thing we have to Anthony Burgess, a wildly eccentric polymath with great gifts in many disciplines.

At the time of his death, he held two academic appointments at Harvard - in applied biomechanics and biology.

He had helped to invent the new science of biomechanics, which focuses on locomotion, and did everything from design the world's finest indoor running track, which improved times everywhere it was installed, to publish influential books like On Size and Life and Muscles, Reflexes, and Locomtion.

His first novel, Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry, was written when he was 24, while he was working on his doctorate in fluid mechanics at M.I.T. With a title like that, it's not much of a surprise to find it didn't sell too well.

His next novel, McKay's Bees, didn't do much better. He followed that with Loving Little Egypt in 1987, which won a prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, though it didn't sell any better than the first two.

Recently, Ira Foxglove was published. This novella, discovered among his papers a year or so after his death, may be an early work - undated, it's impossible to determine exactly when it was created - but has the same loopy style and charm and inventiveness of his previously published books. From the book:

"Why then?" she asks. "Oh, I don't know," he replies. "That never seems like a question worth asking. How, maybe, but not why.... Whether I only want to succeed or whether I really need to won't determine whether I do or not."

I just ordered it from amazon.