There was Thomas Wolfe, wearing a black slouch hat, advancing in his long mountaineer’s stride, with his billowing black raincoat, chanting, “I wrote ten thousand words today—I wrote ten thousand words today.”

“Gertrude moved her large face close to mine. ‘You know, Hemingway, you’re someone I created, a macho character who roams the earth looking for adventure. The truth is, under pressure you have proved to be quite yellow, which is really an embarrassment to me.’

The writing hand wants to write about what she did Saturday night: “I drank whiskey straight all night and stared at a man’s back across the bar. He was wearing a red T-shirt. I imagined him to have the face of Harry Belafonte. At three A.M., he finally turned my way and I spit into the ashtray when I saw him. He had the face of a wet mongrel who h

I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J. D. Salinger or John Cheever or John Collier or John O‘Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O’Connor