Diary Prequel Package — page 443

He summoned an old friend, Will Schwalbe, editor in chief of Hyperion Books, and made him the steward of his novel in progress, a rambling history of homosexuality and AIDS in the United States. He told Mr. Schwalbe to self-publish it if necessary, using money from Mr. Kramer's estate. It didn't come to that. Mr. Kramer survived a liver transplant and finished the book, a project he had begun more than 30 years ago. Now, at 79 and against all odds and expectations, he has lived to see it published. The first volume, "The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart," weighing in at 775 pages, comes out Tuesday from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mr. Kramer has already thrown himself into finishing the second volume, which is to come out in 2017. "Larry lives to write," said Mr. Schwalbe, who is now an executive vice president at Macmillan. "There's no doubt in my mind that Larry's writing is what keeps him alive." Photo Mr. Kramer, 79, defied the odds and lived to see the publication of "The American People." Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times "Magnum opus" doesn't seem like a robust enough phrase to describe the scope of "The American People," which stretches back to the prehistoric swamps of the Everglades and concludes, in the second volume, in contemporary New York City. When Farrar acquired the two volumes in 2010, the narrative had swelled to around 4,000 pages. Blending farce and tragedy, autobiography and fiction, it opens as Fred Lemish, a standin for Mr. Kramer, is struggling to finish writing a book titled "The American People," a far-reaching historical exposé that describes Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and other major historical figures as gay. "He's been struggling with this history for many years," Mr. Kramer writes of his fictional counterpart.