Come Along with Me

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  During this time, when I was carrying home some ten or twelve letters a day, and receiving a weekly package from The New Yorker, I got one letter which troubled me a good deal. It was from California, short, pleasant, and very informal. The man who wrote it clearly expected that I would recog ... (continue)

  During this time, when I was carrying home some ten or twelve letters a day, and receiving a weekly package from The New Yorker, I got one letter which troubled me a good deal. It was from California, short, pleasant, and very informal. The man who wrote it clearly expected that I would recognize his name and reputation, which I didn't. I puzzled over this letter for a day or two before I answered it, because of course it is always irritating to be on the edge of recognizing a name and have it escape you. I was pretty sure that it was someone who had written a book I had read or a book whose review I had read or a story in a recent magazine or possibly even - since I come originally from California - someone with whom I had gone to high school. Finally, since I had to answer the letter, I decided that something carefully complimentary and noncommittal would be best. One day, after I had mailed him my letter, some friends also from California stopped in and asked - as everyone was asking then - what new letters had come. I showed them the letter from my mysterious not-quite-remembered correspondent. Good heavens, they said, was this really a letter from him? Tell me who he is, I said desperately, just tell me who he is. Why, how could anyone forget? It had been all over the California papers for weeks, and in the New York papers, too; he had just been barely acquitted of murdering his wife with an ax. With a kind of awful realization creeping over me I went and looked up the carbon of the letter I had written him, my noncommittal letter. "Thank you very much for your kind letter about my story," I had written. "I admire your work, too."

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Book Details

• Rating:
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• English Books
• Paperback 256 Pages
• Edition: Reprint
• ISBN-10: 0140250379
• ISBN-13: 9780140250374
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
• Pub date: Oct 01, 1995
• Dimensions: 1290 mm x 839 mm x 65 mm Just how big is that?
• Also available as: Hardcover and Others

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