life he remembered still "having no belief in the wisdom of strangulation, for men, women, and children, however they might seem to deserve it, and being fully persuaded that the worst men have most need of repentance, and that they who are unfit to live, are still more unfit to die." Bankruptcy law Neal became active in bankruptcy law reform shortly after his own bankruptcy in 1816. As a young Baltimore lawyer he took an unpopular stance against Chief Justice Marshall's opinion in Sturges v. Crowninshield (1819) and played a prominent role in the movement for a national bankruptcy law. He continued by attacking the policy of imprisonment for debt in his Baltimore novels and in American and British newspapers later in the 1820s. Legacy Scattered genius Neal's reputation as an intellectually dispersed and uncontrolled genius is exemplified by biographer Windsor Daggett, who claimed "he scattered his genius into many channels at a loss." Historian Edward H. Elwell opined that "he wrote for everything because he could not write long for anything." By Neal's own admission, a year-long stint as newspaper editor was "a long while, for any thing I had to do with." American literature scholar Fred Lewis Pattee saw Neal's as "genius of a type that must be especially defined" with words like "energy and persistence" but also "ignorance colossal". American literature scholar Theresa A. Goddu concluded that Neal had been canonized as "half wildman, half genius". Edgar Allan Poe was "inclined to rank John Neal first, or at all events second, among our men of indisputable genius", but in the same paragraph rated his work as "massive and undetailed", "hurried and indistinct", and "deficient in a sense of completeness". Contemporaries and scholars of Neal alike are disposed to lament his inability to achieve what others saw as the potential of his abilities. Biographer Donald A. Sears classified him as "a writer without a masterpiece" who "lived to be eclipsed by writers of lesser genius but greater control of their talents." Daggett claimed "he flashed youthful brilliance. He never quite caught up with it or conquered it, and so he sometimes wore the stamp of failure in the minds of his contemporaries." American literature scholar Alexander Cowie referred to Neal as "the victim of his own lust for words" with "no single work of fiction which deserves to be revived for its sheer merit" and no books "worth