Alex Haley and John Maynard Keynes: Self-Confident Authors

Alex Haley used to hang out at the Savoy, a local restraurant in Rome, NY. While writing Roots, he told the owner, "I am writing a book that is going to change how white people look at black people in America."

While writing The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes had an argument with George Bernard Shaw about Marx. Keynes wrote to Shaw on 1 January 1935:

"...To understand my state of mind, however, you have to know that I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory, which will largely revolutionise - not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years - the way the world thinks about economic problems. When my new theory has been duly assimilated and mixed with politics and feelings and passions, I can't predict what the upshot will be in its effects on actions and affairs. But there will be a great change, and, in particular, the Ricardian foundations of Marxism will be knocked away.

I can't expect you, or anyone else, to believe this at the present stage. But for myself I don't merely hope what I say, - in my own mind I'm quite sure."

I don't accept that Marx built on Say's Law, which is what Keynes refuted.