The other day I received a package from my brother. He had been cleaning out his house, preparing to sell it, and found things my parents must have given him when they sold their house 40 years ago and moved into a one-bedroom apartment.
This material began with my birth and continued into my early adulthood. Some of it I had; some I was familiar with; but some astounded me. I had no idea they had collected it. I felt great delight at having it before me – and great guilt for having allowed disgruntlements and discontents from preventing me from demonstrated the reciprocal consideration and kindness toward my parents that this appreciation of me deserved.
But someone has told me that all children feel they have not done enough for their parents, and all parents feel they have not done enough for their children. And as my brother said, when he admitted sharing some of my feelings, they could not help being themselves and more than we could help being ourselves. (Also when I mentioned my experience to a woman of my age, with whom I chat at the Wrench Café, she thanked me. She saved similar material for her sons and was pleased to know they would receiving it. Maybe, it occurred to me, all parents have this “hoarding” gene and, not being one, I had not known this until what was in my mailbox bit me.)
Anyway, I have a series of pieces I’ve written about growing up in West Philadelphia in the 1950s, which I had intended to re-blog here. Now my plan is to do that but to intersperse them, more or less sequentially, as I work my way through this box.

Law School (3.)
Penn replaced numerical grades with adjectives. That made it nearly impossible to flunk out. I failed Tax. I received “Excellent” in Fed. Courts. I was mediocre everywhere else.
My main interest was extra-curricula. I had a skill. I wanted to make a contribution. I volunteered to interview clients and do legal research at the Voluntary Defender’s and Community Legal Services. I taught “Your Civil Rights” in a public high school. (“The kids’ll want to know,” someone told me, “what to do if a cop wants to look for drugs up their asshole.”) And I rode as a civilian observer in a patrol car on its evening tour.
I never caught a violent crime or kicked-in door. Mainly I saw DUIs and domestic beefs. One night two young officers shoved a broad shouldered, 40 year old against the booking desk. He smelled of alcohol. He wore a houndstooth cap. The fly on his slacks was down. He had a four-inch scar over one eye. The charges were Loitering and Prowling.
He had $.62 and a billfold stuffed with papers. On a job application, he had penciled, “Have attain some excellence as a boxer.” “Hey, Pete, watch out. This guy was a fighter,” one officer said. Pete laughed. “What’s your name?” “Charley Scott.”
“Charley Scott?” I said.
The man nodded.
I had seen him the best night of his life. He had knocked out Sugar Hart in the ninth in a fight they still talked about. Then, for Christmas money, he’d gone up to New York and lost 5-4-1 to Benny Paret, and Paret got the title shot. Within a couple years, Paret was dead, killed in the ring by Emile Griffith, and Scott was on his slide.
He left for Detective Division, light on his feet, a fighter’s bounce.

The bar that year was The Aftermath.
Chuckie Tusk, Billy McDonnell’s ex-cop uncle, had a cheesy Italian restaurant a block from Lorna’s. He let Tommy and Max open up the basement on his liquor license. They hung posters of Belmondo and Dylan and James Dean on the walls. They put a lava lamp by the register and “Good Vibrations” and “Rainy Day Women” and “Spend the Night Together” on the jukebox. A couple times Max let me card people, which was cool.
But we weren’t like before. I was still scared of acid and had quit meth once I heard how bad it was. Max was shooting it. I was playing basketball in an alumni league with stock brokers and endocrinologists. He was getting high in apartments smelling of cat piss with people who saw a night shift at the post office as a step up. I was headed toward the Bar. He had dropped the French he needed to graduate. “Whatever happened to you, man?” I said. “I’m happy,” he said. He told me pot would be legal within five years; the major tobacco companies had already registered the groovy brand names. (With the same assurance, he would tell me a few years later that heroin was not dangerous. The overdoses the media reported were really suicides. “You’ve seen the notes?” I said.)
One snowy night, we closed the bar early and, loaded with beer and Dex, headed his old Buick to the East Village. The car floated back and forth across three lanes. We couldn’t see two feet through any window. Back in his apartment, we laid our score across a Daily News headline: “$50,000 College Dope Ring Smashed.”
I saw that in my story too.

I read Tortilla Flats, Confessions of a Shy Pornographer, The Magus. (“There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum,” I wrote in my journal. “At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.”) I dated a teacher of deaf children, a go-go dancer Hesh fixed me up with after I put in a word for him with the judge assigned his latest bust, a divorced cellist studying at Curtis. “I could care about you,” she said. “You’re intelligent, sensitive, attractive, together; and you’re not a head. Could you care about me?” I didn’t say anything. “Have you ever cared about anyone?” “There was this girl in college.” The next time I saw her, she was in a booth at Frank’s pressed against a French horn player with a paisley necktie and purple, wide-wale corduroys.
Johnson bombed Hanoi and Haiphong. Students seized buildings on the campuses of Northwestern and Cheyney State. Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Tampa, Newark, Durham, Memphis, and Detroit burned.
Dylan crashed his motorcycle and broke his neck – or didn’t.

Stanley Kessler was married at the Bellevue and took a job in mergers and acquisitions at a thirty member firm on Broad Street. Tim O’Cullinan was married under a tent in Scarsdale, and Tank Nonnanucci in a church in Boston, and Mick Magyar a country club in Wilmington.
Max married Rose in the living room of a Justice of the Peace’s in Upper Darby. The bride wore pink hot pants and a halter top. The groom wore shades and a Day-Glo painted ankle cast he had earned jumping off The Aftermath’s bar. (“He thought he could fly,” Billy said. “What else?”) Gino and Flossy and Goatley and Hickey and Moates and Hesh and Will and Billy Harley and Sally and Bernie and his old lady were there. We were in suits and Levis and madras and minis. We came in cars and on bikes. “I pronounce you man and wife,” the J.P. said. “You owe me $10, young man.” Then we went to the Center City Sheraton and turned on.
I was doing nothing I liked. I was hanging with people to whom I no longer connected. I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t studying. I was thinking nothing new.
Mark Harris’s new book mentioned Adele twice.
I grew another beard.

The main preoccupation third year was the draft.
It worked like this. You registered when you were 18. You were eligible until 26. Each local board had a quota, but you were safe if you were physically or mentally unfit, if you were an alcoholic, drug addict, homosexual, felon. That didn’t help most law students, but your board could also defer students or if your work was important to the nation. Since most of us had gone straight from high school to college to law school, we were 25 and needed one more year.
Vietnam had quotas rising, so guys from small towns or rich suburbs were eye-ing the Reserves, the National Guard, and JAG. But I was from a neighborhood where boys didn’t go to college, let alone law school. And my board’s chairman’s son was a second year student at Temple, and what it did with me would set precedent for him.
I thought about a Masters degree (“Boring”), a clerkship (“Been there”), the Peace Corps (“Two years”). One afternoon, I picked a copy of Ramparts off a desk in the library. It had a color spread on the Haight Ashbury. I could not believe people walked around in public like that. (What is now known as “The ‘60s” did not hit most of the country until some time between the Democratic Convention riots in August 1968 and Woodstock a year later. Philly had about six hippies in 1967. They hung at Rittenhouse Square, where the police rousted them for freaking out old ladies.)
I decided to let VISTA send me to San Francisco. I thought I was promising material. I hung with Al Hickey. I was for the exclusionary rule. I opposed capital punishment and the NBA’s de facto-ed half-white rosters. “I still might end up,” I wrote on my application, “working for a Philadelphia law firm, but at least it would not be because I had taken the easy road simply because it was easy and well-traveled and there.”
It did not escape me that Adele was in San Francisco.
It did not escape me she was my insanity.

Max shot speed for ten days before his pre-induction physical. He wore to it a fatigue jacket, filthy jeans, loafers without socks. When they passed out questionnaires, he dropped his pencil. He picked it up but dropped his paper. He picked it up but made such a mess, he crumpled it into a ball and demanded another sheet – yelled for a new sheet he was so into the questions. Max was shaking and sweating so badly, the sergeant sent him to the medical officer. The officer asked if he wanted meds.
Then he certified Max as crazy. Max went home and everyone else stepped closer to the rice paddies.

The call woke me one morning in June. “Robert Levy? Terrence Killeen. Assistant counsel to the Office of Economic Opportunity. Congratulations. You’ll be providing legal assistance to community action groups in Chicago. And tell your local board General Hershey says we’re in the national interest.”
I had no idea what community action was.

I took an apartment in Powelton Village, a neighborhood to Penn’s north, of sycamore-shaded streets and big houses broken into tiny apartments for poor blacks, un-gallery connected artists, unpublished writers, out of power agitators, and assorted misfits, eccentrics and madmen. (Ira Einhorn, the hippie guru/trunk murderer-to-be, was already there, spouting off about Marshall McCluan and who killed Kennedy to a crowd of six. John Africa, who would build MOVE into an organization whose members’ home a future mayor would deem it necessary to bomb, wasn’t yet.)
My apartment had splattered floors like Jackson Pollock had been its previous tenant. Each time I went out, I thought every Negro I passed would offer me a joint, each long-haired girl would comment on the book I was carrying and invite me to her pad.
Never happened.

Law school was looking up though. We could choose some courses. (I went with Advanced Criminal Procedure, Evidence, Con. Law.) The professors tempered the bullying and ridicule, as if our re-enrolling had earned us that much.
First semester, my average went up eight points. Second, it dropped four but was respectable. One night I dreamed I was living in a shack in the Keys with a sign in the yard: “Robert A. Levin. Bait. Tackle. Attorney-at-Law.”
It seemed the best I could imagine.

I was smoking pot with Max every weekend. And snorting meth-amphetamine.
I liked drugs because they set me apart. (I knew only one other law student who did them.) I felt part of this dangerous, elite vanguard. It was cool to be at a party, knowing you were high and no one else was. But soon Max was turning on more people – and dealing on the side. Instead of drugs being something cool guys did, it was as if turning on made you cool. Like if somebody you always thought was an asshole passed you a joint, you were supposed to dig him.
Then LSD hit. Max grabbed onto it too. Those were the days of stories about teenagers burning out corneas staring into the sun and English lit instructors jumping through windows and running naked down the street and being at parties with a girl trying to flush her foot down the toilet or a naked guy, a top hat over his cock, tipping it to everyone who walked in.
That was not how I wanted to be remembered.
Or maybe I was chickenshit.

We had a new place to drink.
Lorna’s was on Walnut, two blocks from the law school. A circular bar filled most of the room. There were stools around it and booths along the east side. The juke box played “Midnight Hour” and “Summer in the City” and “Devil With the Blue Dress On.”
Lorna was a black haired, blue jeaned mother of two, who’d got title in a divorce. Her bartender, Billy McDonnell, was a hatchet-faced, pompadoured sociopath from Fishtown, the worst white neighborhood I’d ever seen. Her bouncer was Hesh Berkowitz, a 35-year-old clammer from Absecon Island, who’d once shot up with Lennie Bruce. Her base clientele were cops and felons and beauticians and Penn football players looking for fights and the occasional copy writer down from New York or blues guitarist up from New Orleans who’d heard this was a scene.
Then there was us. “Us” was me and Max and Rose. I brought Travis Cost, who was studying Tolkien, while hustling chess and pool around Powelton Village, and Al Hickey, the only black guy in my class to come back second year. Al brought Ray Goatley, a Negritude-inspired collagist, and Don Moates, a runner for Titus Blood, a p.i. lawyer and local CORE chief; and Don brought Will Tottenham, the dental school’s major doper. Max brought Flopsy and Mopsy Goldstein, daughters of a neurosurgeon, whom he’d known since Labor Zionist camp, and Pumps, who brought Dan Indio, a stock clerk who’d helped him steal the safe. Flopsy’s husband Randy, who was AWOL from the army came; so did Mopsy’s, Gino DiPieto, who’d served two years on a Nike base on Guam. Gino brought Reds Wolf, another West Philly guy he’d been in the service and who was working as typesetter; and Reds brought Bernie Blumberg, who had a Mexican import business in New Hope he was thinking of converting into a head shop; and Bernie brought Pete the Pipe, a diesel mechanic from Upper Darby, and Billy Harley, a biker with no teeth, and his girlfriend Sally, who didn’t talk; and Sally brought her girl friend Annie, whose father played first violin with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and who slept with Tommy and Hesh and Tommy again.
One of them would be stabbed to death in prison and one jailed for smuggling guns and dope and one die in a car wreck on his way back from a Black Panther meeting and one after falling off a cliff while drunk and one from infections secondary to intravenous drug use and a few simply dissolve into time; but I didn’t know any of this then.
I once went 36 nights in a row.

I went out with a Negro girl I’d met in high school, a salesclerk at Wannamaker’s, a girl who’d led cheers at Overbrook for Walt Hazzard and Wally Jones; and, some nights, after leaving them, I took long rides out Baltimore Pike and thought about Adele. I read Cuckoo’s Nest and Tenants of Moonbloom and Sot Weed Factor. (“One must needs make and seize his soul, and then cleave fast to it, or go babbling in the corner,” I wrote in my journal. “One must assert, assert, assert or go screaming mad.”) ) I wrote the “Bars, Jazz Clubs and Coffee Houses” chapter for The Collegiate Guide to Philadelphia. (When the copy I submitted included Drury Lane, a Center City gay bar, the editor showed newfound interest me that didn’t quite register.) I bribed an usher to sneak me into a sold-out Academy of Music and saw Dylan plant himself at the stage’s edge and spit “Like a Rolling Stone” into his audience’s teeth. I began a story about a college basketball player whose roommate is arrested for stealing a safe. By its end, the player was to lose his friend, his girl, and basketball.
Lyndon Johnson ordered the DMZ bombed. 200,000 anti-war demonstrators marched in New York. Omaha, Chicago and Cleveland burned.

I turned down a summer job with the Law Students Civil Rights Research Committee to clerk for a Common Pleas Court judge. LSCRRC would have shut me in a library. Clerking gave me people to experience.
Like the 13 year old boy who accused his next door neighbor of forcing him to commit oral sodomy. Like the deaf and dumb 19 year old who communicated only through a sign language understood by no one but his grandmother. Like Willy Smith, imprisoned since 1948 on a confession beaten out of him by police. I wrote the opinion that set Willy free.
I thought, You get one life. If you do not do things in it while you have the chance, you never will. Why then, I thought, do things that substantially increase your chance of losing that life? Why, for instance, fight a war that will make no difference?
The next march, I stepped off the curb.

My latest piece, a review of “Despair,” vol. 2, by J.T. Dockery, has gone up at http://www.tcj.com/reviews/despair-vol-2/

It begins like this:

In the dark corners of art labor those driven by integrity or madness, devotion to personal vision or consequential blindness to produce what they must.
J.T. Dockery has been at it most of his thirty-eight years. He is from Grey Hawk, in rural eastern Kentucky, baptized at eight, out of the church by ten, diagnosed at twenty with psoriatic arthritis, caged within its pain since. Heavy drinking was replaced by heavy reading, when his liver quit on the former. The tuburcular novelist Hubert Selby, Jr. became an inspiration, the noir-enraptured author Nick Tosches another, the manic depressive, psychobilly one-man band Hasil Adkins, a third. Dockery draws, writes, and plays in garage bands. He has said, “(T)he only gods I believe in are concepts of endless mystery, endless questions, and guiding precepts of love, compassion and forgiveness…” He has been to Berea College, UK, and Morehead State and, after a lengthy stop in White River, VT, lives in London, KY.

Maybe you’ve read about the 900-author protest letter to Amazon about its treatment of Hatchette Books. Here it is, along with the e-mail address of Jeff Bezos, so you can add your two cents.

Authors United
P.O. Box 4790
Santa Fe, NM 87502
For information, email Douglas Preston
at doug@authorsunited.netA Letter to Our Readers:
Amazon is involved in a commercial dispute with the book publisher Hachette , which owns Little, Brown, Grand Central Publishing, and other familiar imprints. These sorts of disputes happen all the time between companies and they are usually resolved in a corporate back room.

But in this case, Amazon has done something unusual. It has directly targeted Hachette’s authors in an effort to force their publisher to agree to its terms.

For the past several months, Amazon has been:

–Boycotting Hachette authors, by refusing to accept pre-orders on Hachette authors’ books and eBooks, claiming they are “unavailable.”

–Refusing to discount the prices of many of Hachette authors’ books.

–Slowing the delivery of thousands of Hachette authors’ books to Amazon customers, indicating that delivery will take as long as several weeks on most titles.

–Suggesting on some Hachette authors’ pages that readers might prefer a book from a non-Hachette author instead.

As writers–most of us not published by Hachette–we feel strongly that no bookseller should block the sale of books or otherwise prevent or discourage customers from ordering or receiving the books they want. It is not right for Amazon to single out a group of authors, who are not involved in the dispute, for selective retaliation. Moreover, by inconveniencing and misleading its own customers with unfair pricing and delayed delivery, Amazon is contradicting its own written promise to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company.”

Many of us have supported Amazon since it was a struggling start-up. Our books launched Amazon on the road to selling everything and becoming one of the world’s largest corporations. We have made Amazon many millions of dollars and over the years have contributed so much, free of charge, to the company by way of cooperation, joint promotions, reviews and blogs. This is no way to treat a business partner. Nor is it the right way to treat your friends. Without taking sides on the contractual dispute between Hachette and Amazon, we encourage Amazon in the strongest possible terms to stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business. None of us, neither readers nor authors, benefit when books are taken hostage. (We’re not alone in our plea: the opinion pages of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which rarely agree on anything, have roundly condemned Amazon’s corporate behavior.)

We call on Amazon to resolve its dispute with Hachette without further hurting authors and without blocking or otherwise delaying the sale of books to its customers.

We respectfully ask you, our loyal readers, to email Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, at jeff@amazon.com, and tell him what you think. He says he genuinely welcomes hearing from his customers and claims to read all emails at that account. We hope that, writers and readers together, we will be able to change his mind.

Sincerely,

Megan Abbott
Robert H. Abel
Rachael Acks
William M. Adler
Elisa Albert
William Alexander
Sherman Alexie
Mike Allen
Jonathan Ames
Laurie Halse Anderson
Roger Angle
Carol Anshaw
Anne Applebaum
Debby Applegate
Kelley Armstrong
Rilla Askew
Rick Atkinson
James David Audlin
Paul Auster
Ellis Avery
Avi
Barbe Awalt
Gillian Bagwell
Blake Bailey
Deirdre Bair
Jo Baker
Kevin Baker
Mishell Baker
David Baldacci
Melissa Bank
Linwood Barclay
Evelyn Barish
Juliana Barnet
Rebecca Barnhouse
Nevada Barr
Quentin Bates
Elif Batuman
Douglas Bauer
Erica Bauermeister
Cris Beam
Greg Bear
James Beauregard
Antony Beevor
Adam Begley
Louis Begley
Hilari Bell
Madison Smartt Bell
Martine Bellen
Sam Bellotto Jr.
Aimee Bender
Karen E. Bender
Lou J. Berger
Daniel Bergner
Bob Berman
Anne Bernays
Suzanne Berne
Steve Berry
Lauren Beukes
Clara Bingham
Lisa Birnbach
Michael Bishop
Lauren Bjorkman
Holly Black
Shayla Black
Grant Blackwood
Linda M. Bland
Meredith Bland
David W. Blight
Carole Bloom
Cas Blomberg
Deborah Blum
Judy Blundell
Charles Bock
Amy Boesky
Paul Bogard
Johnny D. Boggs
Chris Bohjalian
Robert M. Bolstad
Marianne Boruch
Joanna Bourke
Betsy Connor Bowen
Walt Boyes
Ben Bradlee Jr.
Mike Bradley
Jess Brallier
Taylor Branch
H.W. Brands
Kylie Brant
Gary Braver
Catherine Brennan
Marie Brennan
Alan Brennert
Morgan S. Brilliant
Douglas Brinkley
Pope Brock
Laura Brodie
Lora Brody
Geraldine Brooks
Harriet Brown
Jennifer Brown
Lisa Brown
Sandra Brown
Bliss Broyard
Cathy Marie Buchanan
Marina Budhos
Christopher Buehlman
Kate Buford
Jan Burke
Cherie Burns
Benjamin Busch
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Pat Cadigan
Susannah Cahalan
Chelsea Cain
Kenneth Cain
Susan Cain
Wayne Caldwell
Philip Caputo
Jacqueline Carey
Peter Ames Carlin
Ron Carlson
Robert A. Caro
David Carothers
Cynthia Carr
H.G. Carrillo
Betsy Carter
Mary E. Carter
Carol Cassella
Brian Castner
Michael Chabon
Rebecca Chance
Angie Chau
Thomas Chavez
Susan Cheever
Ron Chernow
Harriet Scott Chessman
Jaima Chevalier
Tracy Chevalier
Jennifer Chiaverini
Lee Child
Lincoln Child
Mark Childress
Kate Christensen
Jill Ciment
Sandra Cisneros
Breena Clarke
Antoinette Nora Claypoole
Meg Waite Clayton
Andrew Clements
Katherine Clements
Rachel Cline
Mick Cochrane
David B. Coe
William D. Cohan
Leah Hager Cohen
James Collins
Suzanne Collins
Tom Connor
Christopher D. Cook
Stephanie Cooke
Martha Cooley
Ellen Cooney
Karen Coody Cooper
Artemis Cooper
Constance Cooper
Jen Corace
Zizou Corder
Douglas Corleone
Kelly Corrigan
Bruce Coville
Robert Crais
Sara Creasy
Sharon Creech
Elizabeth Crook
Dave Cullen
Robert Dallek
William Dalrymple
Mark Z. Danielewski
Leslie Daniels
Jack Dann
Ellen Datlow
Saul David
Lauren B. Davis
Lindsey Davis
Angela Davis-Gardner
Jeffery Deaver
Barbara Dee
Jonathan Dee
Dale DeGroff
Barbara Delinsky
Nelson DeMille
David Denby
Jerry Dennis
Hannah Dennison
William Deresiewicz
Mary Alice Deveny
Julia DeVillers
Junot Díaz
Mary Lou Dickinson
David Dobbs
Anthony Doerr
Linda Donn
Beverly Donofrio
James Donovan
David R. Dow
Brendan DuBois
Andre Dubus III
Sarah Dunant
Andy Duncan
Tom Dunkel
Susan Edmiston
Jennifer Egan
Martha Egan
Robert Eggleton
Benita Eisler
Amal El-Mohtar
Kimberly Elkins
Elissa Elliott
Kate Elliott
Abby Ellin
Carson Ellis
Joseph J. Ellis
P.N. Elrod
Ken Emerson
Alexandra Enders
Terry England
Hallie Ephron
Catherine Epstein
Mark Epstein
Pamela Erens
Mark Essig
Sir Harold Evans
Anne Fadiman
Susan Faludi
Ellen Feldman
Joshua Ferris
Lucy Ferriss
Amanda Filipacchi
Joseph Finder
William Finnegan
Suzanne Finstad
Eric Fischl
Janet Fitch
Stona Fitch
Paul Fleischman
Ronald Florence
Nick Flynn
Tom Folsom
Alison Ashley Formento
Richard Thompson Ford
Amanda Foreman
J.L. Forrest
Connie May Fowler
Karen Joy Fowler
Ruth E. Francis
Diana Pharaoh Francis
Judith Frank
Thaisa Frank
Laurie Frankel
Caroline Fraser
Laura Fraser
Ian Frazier
John Freeman
Pamela Freeman
Ru Freeman
Richard E. Friesen
Gregory Frost
Laura Furman
Neal Gabler
Peter Gadol
Mary Gaitskill
Nicole Galland
Jack Gantos
Nasario Garcia
Barbara Garson
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Jaym Gates
Alison Gaylin
Elizabeth George
Giuseppe Gerbino
Denise Giardina
Elizabeth Gilbert
Susan Jane Gilman
Jennifer Gilmore
Malcolm Gladwell
Krystyna Poray Goddu
Peter Godwin
Glen David Gold
Stephen Goldin
Beverly Gologorsky
Laurence Gonzales
Arquímedes González
Brad Gooch
Alison Gopnik
Jim Gorant
Mary Gordon
Meryl Gordon
Angeline Goreau
Steven Gould
Philip Gourevitch
Marie Grace
Cheryl Grace
D.G. Grace
Heather Graham
Linda Grant
Elizabeth Graver
George Dawes Green
Jeff Greenwald
Dr. David H. Grinspoon
John Grisham
Andrew Gross
Michael Gruber
Lisa Grunwald
Talia Gryphon
Kevin Guilfoile
Melissa Guion
Allan Gurganus
Beth Gutcheon
Dan Gutman
Mark Haddon
Steven Hahn
Loretta Hall
Karen Hall
Emma Walton Hamilton
Jane Hamilton
Masha Hamilton
Mary Stewart Hammond
Patricia Hampl
Elizabeth Hand
Daniel Handler a.k.a Lemony Snicket
Sharon Hanna
Sophie Hannah
Thor Hanson
Alyssa Harad
Elizabeth Harlan
Ann Harleman
Stephan J. Harper
Stephen Harrigan
Ellen Harris
Sam Harris
C.C. Harrison
Carolyn Hart
Aaron Hartzler
Adrianne Harun
Yona Harvey
Todd Hasak-Lowy
Molly Haskell
Susan Carol Hauser
Katherine B. Hauth
John Twelve Hawks
Roy Hayes
Terrance Hayes
Toby Fesler Heathcotte
Jeff Hecht
Travis Heermann
Sarah Hegger
Ursula Hegi
Charles Ota Heller
Marla Heller
Kaui Hart Hemmings
Amy Hempel
Lauren Henderson
Joshua Henkin
Greg Herren
Peggy Herrington
Rachel Herz
Carol DeChellis Hill
Joe Hill
Anne Hillerman
Brenda Hillman
Hilary Hinzmann
Tom Hirschfeld
Jack Hitt
Sylvia Anna Hivén
Valerie Hobbs
Mary Ann Hoberman
Sheri Holman
Rachel Holmes
Woody Holton
Ed Hoornaert
Ellen Hopkins
Deborah Hopkinson
Nalo Hopkinson
James D. Hornfischer
Shel Horowitz
Tony Horwitz
Silas House
Hugh Howard
James Howe
Del Howison
Mary Hudson
Laird Hunt
Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Gregg Hurwitz
Nancy Huston
Siri Hustvedt
Elisabeth Hyde
Amy Ignatow
Gerald Imber, M.D.
Susan Isaacs
Steve Jackson
Diane Jacobs
Linda Jaivin
Michael Jecks
Suzanne Jenkins
Sarah Jensen
Erika Johansen
Gilbert John
Fenton Johnson
Brian Jay Jones
Steve Jones
Michaele Jordan
Sam Jordison
Mike Jung
Sebastian Junger
A.P. Von K’Ory
Judi Kadden
Bonita Kale
Stephanie Kallos
Robert Kanigel
Andrew Kaplan
James Kaplan
Jim Kaplan
Paul Karasik
Mary Karr
John Katzenbach
Joe Kelly
Judith Kelman
Joshua Kendall
Katrina Kenison
Brad Kessler
Frances Kiernan
Martin Kihn
Sarah S. Kilborne
Daniel M. Kimmel
A.S. King
Dave King
Lily King
Stephen King
Tabitha King
Barbara Kingsolver
Maxine Hong Kingston
Dave Kinney
Floris M. Kleijne
Christina Baker Kline
Alethea Kontis
Lily Koppel
Anne Korkeakivi
Michael Koryta
Sally Koslow
Alex Kotlowitz
Stephen Kotowych
Jon Krakauer
Mark Kramer
Matthew Kressel
Katherine Kurs
Sandra Gail Lambert
Anne Landsman
Eve Laplante
Erik Larson
Lee Adair Lawrence
Roland Lazenby
Linda Lear
Nicole J. LeBoeuf
Cherie Lee
Vicki T. Lee
Joan Leegant
Dennis Lehane
Jim Lehrer
Kate Lehrer
Stina Leicht
Bobbie Leigh
Thomas P. Leiker
Brad Leithauser
Dinah Lenney
Anne Leonard
Peter Lerangis
Edward M. Lerner
John Lescroart
Diane Leslie
Jonathan Lethem
Tom Levenson
Phillis Levin
David D. Levine
Judith Levine
Jim Lewis
Michael Lewis
Norma Libman
Katia Lief
Terr Light
Alan Lightman
Jane Lindskold
Elinor Lipman
Laura Lippman
Jonathan Littell
Aimee Liu
Malinda Lo
Michaele Lockhart
Lois Lowry
David Lubar
Jason Erik Lundberg
Steve Luxenberg
William Lychack
Barry Lyga
Anne Lyle
Larissa MacFarquhar
Karen Mack
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