In a broken-down 1957 Ford we limped across to New York during the worst snowstorms in thirty years.

My wife and her son stayed with a friend I’d known in the Village, and I slept on the sofa at the home of Leo &Diane Dillon, the two finest artists I know. Leo & Diane slept on the floor. They are more than merely friends.It was December of 1961, and amid the tensions and horrors of that eight-week stay in New York, twothings happened that brought momentary light, and helped me keep hold:

The first was a review by Dorothy Parker in Esquire of a small-printing paperback collection of my stories.How she had obtained it I do not know. (When I met her, later, in Hollywood, she was unable to remember where thebook had come from.) But she raved about it, and said I had talent, and it was the first really substantial affirmativenotice from a major critic. It altered the course of my writing career, and provided my ego—which had beennourishing itself cannibalistically on itself—with reason for feeling I could write.

The second happening of light was, the sale of this book. Gerry Gross bought it for short money, mostlybecause he knew I was in a bad way. But it provided the funds to start out for Los Angeles.

We traveled a bard road down through the Southwest, and in Fort Worth we were staved in by a drunkencowboy in a pickup. Rear-ended. He had a carhop on one arm, and a fifth of Teacher’s in the free band. Rammed uson an icy bridge, smashed the car, crushed the rear-end trunk containing our luggage and my typewriter, and Isuppose it was that typewriter that saved our lives. The typewriter has paid the rent and put food on the table manytimes, but that time it physically gave up its life to save me.