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especially for this girl. Tola made the picture. “Tola” is what we call Litvak. He's Russians--one of the most charming men in the world. I'll tell you about him in a minute. He got Twentieth Century-Fox to back him. He needed a backer of course. He personally made a fortune on the picture, and the picture was a knock-out. It starred Olivia de Haviland and she won the Academy Award for her performance. It made her a big star, and the picture won a string of prizes. It was a huge financial success.

And Mary Jane Ward never did anything else?

She wrote another book called The Professor's Umbrella, which was a story of faculty politics, obviously at Northwestern where she went. It was quite successful but not in the same league with Snake Pit which was her own story. As far as I know, she's not written anything since. I've lost track of her, but for a while we were very good friends. I like her very much.

I've been very careful about telling authors they've bagged big prizes like this ever since we published a book by a woman named Sally Benson, called Junior Miss, mostly stories from The New Yorker. Sally was a difficult character in spades! She wrote for The New Yorker, and Junior Miss was made up of stories of callow kids going out for dates for the first time--you know, the seventeen and eighteen year olds of yesteryear. The stories in The New Yorker were