Institute History
Description
Boris Crumpacker is the boss of his own company—overbearing, crass, not particularly thoughtful, but immensely capable of taking care of problems. For years now, his firm of Crumpacker and Co. has functioned as an extension of his personality, its beleaguered employees bossed around into acting on his every whim. Then one day, an anonymous letter arrives at the offices of Crumpacker and Co., written by a man who begins to tell Crumpacker the story of his life.
Crumpacker promptly throws it into the trash and that’s the end of that.
And yet, as more letters arrive from the same mysterious man, gradually telling the story of a life so different in every way from his own, Crumpacker begins to find himself wondering for the first time whether the activities in which he engages every day have any real value; and whether he has, in fact, all along in his life been a bad man. And from some yet youthful corner of his jaded self awakens a desire—just a whim, certainly, as are all things with this man, and yet undeniably sincere—to be good.
And so it begins: the transformation of Crumpacker and Co. into a giant research center whose purpose will be an inquiry into life, and of how to be good.
Meanwhile, babies, wives, auditors, the mob, the law… all of life seems to choose this very moment to pick its bone with Crumpacker. Before long, practical problems are piling up high alongside the metaphysical on Crumpacker’s plate, and Crumpacker finds that he must use all of his considerable problem solving capabilities to restore a new balance to his life.
More than anything, Mr. Crumpacker and the Man from the Letter is a comic chronicling of all the twists and contortions any life must go through in its quest for meaning… but magnified in the force of nature that is Boris Crumpacker.