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"...Yes I finished my story and it is a a [sic] beauty but I can't use it. I used the occasion of a town pageant. We had one here in 1953, a sesquicentennial and a local fellow went beserk [sic] and shot the head of the pageant committee and a lawyer and them himself..."

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"...Since I never emerge from these things sounding like anything but a cretin, I have written what I have to say to her down and I intend to present her with it. For the rest I will confine myself to comments on the weather..."

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"...My galleys are on the way and I expect them to be here tomorrow and I dred [sic] having to read the whole thing again and face it in print. The first time is the worst..."

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"I know how you feel about the novel because I am at sort of the same place now myself. I don't have a novel to write and you can't write a novel until you've got something expandable in you. At the same time, I find you can't continue to write one story after another, or anyway I can't because I don't have that many stories either..."

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"...I haven't read Wise Blood since it was published. Maybe some day [sic] I will read it again and decide what I think of it. I know that this new one is much more ambitious and probably less immediately satisfying than WB [sic]..."

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"...I hope you get paid for these reviews if they are going to cut them. Nothing but money makes that endurable..."

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"...These are all people exactly like what I might invent to torture some poor character. The article itself was better than I hoped it would be but then it should have been because I wrote down what I wanted to say and handed it to her when she came. Nevertheless, I have had the creeps for the past two weeks..."

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"My mother has copped all the copies of that article to send to the relatives who don't appreciate me. As there are a great many of them, I don't seem to be able to put my hand on an extra copy but if one turns up, I'll send it to you..."

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"...I have seen the jacket for my novel. On an evil red-lavender background, the hero, F. M. Tarwater, in a black wool hat, peers through some clay-colored corn. It is not as bad as it sounds but it looks like the harder I try to escape the School of Southern Degeneracy, the flatter I fall into it..."

Scope and Contents "In such a place you have to expect them all to sleep around. This is not a sin but Experience [sic], and if you do not sleep with the opposite sex, it is assumed that you sleep with your own. This was in pre-beatnik days but I presume it is all about the same... From what you ask me I see that you do not have any real imaginative vision of what the Church is. I don't take this to be your fault--Catholic education being what it is--but it is time you were learning what it is that...