After Bucknell, I went for a year to the University of Chicago, in 1954 to '55, where I was a graduate student in English and got a master's degree. That was the right place for me to go to, I enjoyed it. I developed a real affection for the place, the neighborhood, Hyde Park, and for the university, and I made some dazzlingly smart friends. From Chicago I went into the army. The draft… the Korean War draft was still on then. The Korean War had ended in '53 I think, but in '55 the draft was still on.

I went into the army and I went in for two years and I got injured in basic training. I injured my back rather severely and by the end of the year I was in the hospital and then from the hospital I was discharged. So I spent a year in the... in the army. The injury… the back injury it turned out to be a bit of a plague for the rest of my life and I've had to put up with pain from time to time. Back in the year 2003, I had surgery on my back and then about three years later I had a second back operation. And all of that is traced back to that injury.

When I was in graduate school and in the army, I began to write stories. I had written some stories in college but they were... they were terrible and… they were highly sensitive and very terrible. But now I began to write different kinds of stories. And in the army I was in the public information office in Washington and there was... there was a typewriter in the office and so at night after dinner I'd come back into the office and I began to write these stories, and some of them were stories that wound up in Goodbye Columbus, my first book.