When I came out of the army I went… I was invited back to Chicago to teach in the composition… freshman composition programme, and so actually I went and for the next two years I taught there, and I would teach all morning and then I would write all afternoon and then at night I would do my papers I had to do and so on. And it was my first true taste of... adulthood. I was 23 or 24 and I had a job, I made money – not very much – and wrote stories. In about '57, I guess, or '58, I began to publish stories in commercial magazines. First I had a story for... in Esquire Magazine, for which I got paid $800, and with that $800 I quit my job and I came to New York to be a writer.

I... I thought that in those days I could live on $100 a month, and I did. And then I wrote a story that wound up in The New Yorker, and so I made a little more money, and that story was called Defender of the Faith, and it brought me my first headaches as a writer. I didn't know what I was getting into.