Drama City

How I traveled to that spring night in 1949 when Walter Bradbury surprised me with myself is an unguided pathway of What Ifs. What if I had never heard and fallen in love with Norman Corwin's radio dramas when I was nineteen? What if I had never sent my first book of stories to Corwin, who then became a lifetime friend? And what if I hadn't taken his advice to go to New York City in June 1949? Then, very simply, The Martian Chronicles might never have existed. But Norman argued again and again that I should be underfoot in the publishing houses of Manhattan and that he and his wife Katie would be there to lead and protect me in and around the Big Town. Because of his persuasion, I traveled across the country, four long days and nights on a Greyhound Bus, fermenting into a large ball of fungus, with a pregnant wife left behind in Los Angeles with $40 in the bank, and the YMCA ($5 a week) waiting for me on Forty-second Street. The Corwins, good to their promise, toured and introduced me to a clutch of editors who asked: "Did you bring a novel?" I confessed that I was a sprinter and had brought only fifty short stories and an ancient, battered portable typewriter ...»