Levine

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In some ways, 1959 was for me a very good year. The preceding fall, I’d moved to New York and gotten a job as reader for a literary agent and settled myself down at last to the task of figuring out how to (a) become a writer and (b) make a living at it. In 1959, fired with youth and freshness and enthusiasm, I churned out more work than in any other year of my life, and most of it found a market. When the dust had settled, it turned out I had produced over half a million published words that year (we say nothing of the unpublished words) and had become a freelance writer. In April, with blind optimism, no money, and an extremely pregnant wife, I had quit my literary agency job, and since that date I have never once, I am happy to say, earned an honest dollar in wages.

Among that year’s output were forty-six short stories and novelettes, of which twenty-seven were published. (That’s about a third of all the short stories I’ve written over my entire life so far.) One of those pieces, written early in March, was novelette entitled “Intellectual Motivation” (I hadn’t yet completely cracked the problem of titles — still haven’t, come to think of it), which was published in the December 1959 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine under the not-much-better-title, “The Best-Friend Murder.” The story contained clear analogies to my own current situation, and when I look back on it from a vantage point (if that’s the phrase I want) of twenty-four years I see it contains more than a little self-analysis and self-criticism. I wasn’t really aware of all that at the time, of course, or I would have been too self-conscious to write the story.

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