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1942 was also the year in which we met Tony Pegis, a Catholic professor up in Canada, and this led to a very important development in our lives. Tony Pegis is the one that persuaded us to do the two-volume St. Thomas Aquinas which ended up with our getting the Madison Avenue palazzo we occupy.

After 1942, there were several years where Random House published nothing particularly noteworthy. Some of our books were successful, but there were none worth dwelling on here.

Then, in the fall of 1945, we published Cass Timberlane, which was the most successful book by Sinclair Lewis that ever bore the Random House imprint. We hadn't done Main Street and Arrowsmith and Babbitt. Those were the days of his greatest glory. That's when he was with Harcourt, Brace and Doubleday. Cass Timberlane, I think, outsold all of those; but it wasn't nearly as good a book.

Then in the spring of 1946 came The Snake Pit, which I've told you about. Also in 1946, another big book that I named, by Nancy Mitford, called The Pursuit of Love.

In the spring of 1947, there was a rather amusing incident. We did a book of poetry by Vincent McHugh called The Blue Hen's Chickens. It hadn't created much of a stir. One day John Sumner, the moron who ran the Committee for the Suppression of Vice, barged into Random House while I was off playing golf and demanded all of the copies of The Blue Hen's Chickens. He said that it was a dirty book. Well, it was about as dirty--by today's standards--as Alice in Wonderland. Of course, Mr. Sumner succeeded only in making this book a