Oh, those oranges arriving in the midst of the North Dakota winters of the forties—the mere color of them, carried through the door in a net bag or a crate from out of the white, winter landscape.

Thomas Wolfe’s first novel, titled O Lost, as submitted to the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner's Sons in 1928, contained 294,000 words.

Rosemary looked over the party; her parents and her parents’ friends down below on the sod lawn. Seersucker and espadrilles; white cotton dresses; Brazilian jazz; the costumes of their heyday. They drank beer and Long Island iced tea and white wine punch, a recipe Rosemary’s mother had clipped from a magazine. Two pitchers on the patio table, under the shade of an umbrella, and two more, waiting in the fridge. Ice cubes slugged into the ice chest; smell of window screen like rust. There were Mr. and Mrs. Carson; Mr. and Mrs. Wentz; the Pattersons in matching hibiscus print; Patricia, who cut Rosemary’s hair; Lauren’s father and his nameless new wife.

There was no warning. He had a sudden brief awareness of movement somewhere along the street behind him, and he turned his head and looked back the way he had come; and then they were upon him.

Though it was pitch dark on the road where the Foxes parked and you tried to keep from stepping in the black puddles of icy mud when you looked up at the stars, North Main Street was brightly-lighted and decorated with lanterns and paper carved pumpkins in the windows, and the street was closed off with flashing barricades and crowded from one end to the other: from the tightly-packed mob around the bandstand where a punk band was pounding out grating music and jumping sometimes with their guitars, to the end of the road near Gepetto’s, where the crowd thinned out and everyone stopped and stood, puzzled and bemused, before turning back to walk again.

Stella wrote that she would take the train to Providence, and he should meet her there in the car. Already he was calculating how he should proceed. A false step would alarm her and throw her off, and he had too much to lose, with all the entanglements of family friend and trust.

Yesterday afternoon a girl walked by the window and stooped for sea shells. I was wrenched out of two months of calm. Nothing more than that, certainly, nothing ecstatic or even interesting, but very silent and even, as those periods have become for me.

At first, the descriptor “Unemployed, Age 34” had sounded almost like a criminal charge, but I’d gotten used to it soon enough.

Nobody had much respect for The Labor Leader. Even Finkel and Kramm, its owners, the two sour brothers-in-law who’d dreamed it up in the first place and who somehow managed to make a profit on it year after year 

At the interview, they had not wanted to know about my degrees or my years of teaching experience, only about “Peace Research.” “Tell us about ‘Peace Research,’” they said. I began the only way