Description
For a while, at least, this will be my last book of short stories. I know that Mme. Schumann-Heink, Sir Harry Lauder, and W. Somerset Maugham have made frequent farewell appearances that followed farewell appearances, and I have qualified my announcement by saying "for a while." I am also perhaps over-conscious of the fact that at my age, fifty-nine, a man had better not be too sure that he is going to finish anything he starts. Suddenly-it seems suddenly to me I find myself referred to as the "granddaddy" and the "old master" of the short story field. Those are direct quotes, and they have as much actuarial as literary significance. I think it was a character of Bugs Baer's whose doctor said, "You're all right, but don't start any continued stories," a prognosis that is as dismal as the governor's refusal to answer the telephone the night before the execution.
It is going to be difficult to resist the temptation to go on writing short stories for me, more difficult than it is to write them. Magazines buy nearly all the stories I write, and they pay me well. Those that are not acceptable to the magazine editors eventually get printed in my short story collections (and have as good a critical record as the stories that were turned down or, in a few cases, were not ever submitted). A story that I sold to The New Yorker for five or six hundred dollars many years ago has brought me around thirty thousand dollars in movie options and the end is not yet. I could live nicely on my income from short stories and nothing else, even without movie options and tele-vision sales, and my taxes would not be so devastating. There is also a temptation to play it safe in my war with the academics and the critics, since they have a hard time rapping the stories and are driven to complaining against "the kind of people" I write about.
ISBN: HORSEKNOWSTHE
