"No."

Minkoff is the tongue-in-cheek founder and president of the Fitz-Greene Halleck Society. He hopes that the society will gather every July 8 so that members can bring rejection letters from publishers and other objects related to failure and contemporary scorn. He calls Halleck "the anti-Melville," because Herman Melville was largely ignored in his own time but is revered now, while Halleck has gone the opposite way.

(Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, 1887, observed that, "Of Halleck's poetical writings it has been well said that brilliancy of thought, quaintness of fancy and polished energy of diction have given them a rank in American literature from which they will not soon be displaced." The Cyclopedia had a short article noting Herman Melville's tale of his capture by a tribe of cannibals; the article merely listed Melville's other works, including "Moby Dick, or the White Whale.")

Minkoff asked a young woman walking with a toddler, "Would you like to know about Fitz-Greene Halleck? We're celebrating his birthday because he's forgotten."

"Thank you, but no."

"Would you like some information?" Minkoff asked the toddler.

Halleck's tribute to Bozzaris concludes, "Bozzaris! ... thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's, One of the few, th'immortal names That were not born to die."

But Mark Twain and others ridiculed that style of high-pitched declamation, and both the ode to Bozzaris and its author soon showed their mortality. Our media age has speeded up both rises and falls, yet well before anyone spoke of "15 minutes of fame," Isaiah and Peter in the Bible each wrote, "All flesh is grass."