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Damien Tavis Toman was born in 1982, the son of an Evangelical minister turned artisan. When he was still a small child, his family moved from Oklahoma to New York, where his remaining years were spent in unbroken obscurity.

As a songwriter, Toman had his most prolific period between 2002 and 2008, wherein he wrote hundreds of songs, attempted myriad genres, and recorded more than 25 albums - a lifetime's work in six years. This was, not coincidentally, an era of tremendous personal upheaval for Toman, during which the artist was divorced once, re-married, and divorced a second time. Taken as a whole, his intimate and autobiographical recordings represent a loose chronicle of Toman's inner life during the rise and fall of his especially tumultuous second marriage. Because of the iconoclastic nature of his songs, and the bombastic brevity of his recording career, a correspondent of Toman's once called him "Rimbaud with a Guitar," an epithet he was known to cherish.

Though a noteworthy and productive songwriter, Toman is perhaps most distinguished by his correspondences. The most important of these were written between 2005 and 2008, to a number of acquaintances, male and female, older and younger, intimate and incidental. In them, Toman shows himself to be far removed from the world of his contemporaries, writing grandiose passages on subjects religious, philosophical, personal and political, in an eloquent style most reminiscent of the English essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, for whom Toman bore an abiding reverence. The book When the Hand of Death Seeks You in Youth: Selected Epistolary Observations is a collection of the finest of these passages, selected and edited by the author himself.

In the latter part of 2008, greatly distraught at the dissolution of his latest marriage, Toman vanished into the Shawangunk Mountains of Upstate New York. His recording output dwindled to a trickle, and his correspondences all but ceased. Still in his mid-twenties, Toman is now regarded as an unapproachable recluse. As is common in cases such as his, Toman is reported to have taken an immoderate interest in religion, with his final few songs and letters being relatively incoherent (albeit characteristically beautiful) pietistic rants. The present Society was formed under the assumption that, like the Rimbaud to whom he was once compared, this voluntary exile is permanent, and Toman's is a talent best relegated to the consideration of history.

On this website the curious visitor will find a comprehensive representation of Damien Tavis Toman's short but fascinating literary and musical career, as well as other artifacts of interest to the researcher, such as photographs and film footage. The Society hopes you will find some cause for meditation in the artistic remnants of this unfortunate young man, who, like the immortal philosophers he most sought to emulate, concerned himself most with the now too often overlooked questions of Virtue and Posterity.

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All Content (C) 2009 by the Estate of Damien Tavis Toman