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fault than his. I thought that he was damned ungrateful. We did a bang-up job for him. Both Storm and Fire were Book-of- the-Month Club selections, although they were completely offbeat. They weren't the usual run of books. Imagine, in one book the storm was the hero and in the next book a forest fire. But he was a very testy and severe man. I didn't like the way that he treated his wife and son. I just didn't like him. I couldn't fake it.

Then Stewart got mixed up with a loyalty oath crisis out at the University of California and became very articulate on the subject. I admired him for this. He took the right stand. But he expected me to come out to California and help. When some of these people get mixed up in a campaign, they expect everybody to help them. I was his publisher so he expected me to come out to California. I said that this was completely outside my province. This was California's fight. I knew none of the people involved. I also knew how Stewart could alienate even people who agreed with his views.

We did one more book of Stewart's called Earth Abides. This was another strange book. It concerned itself with a strange disease that carried off almost everybody in the world. There were only a few survivors left. It was the story of what might happen to these survivors. A similar device was employed later by Pat Frank in a book called Mr. Adam, which, you may remember, told of a holocaust which rendered every man sterile. There was only one man deep down at the bottom of a mine shaft who remained potent or able to reproduce the species.