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March, 1971

The original, completed typescripts of my series of interviews with Robbin Hawkins for the Oral History files at Columbia University were delivered to me in May, 1968--but the corrections necessary were so extensive, and my time thereafter so occupied otherwise, that one year later I had completed only one quarter of the job.

At that point, sad to relate, I put the whole thing aside and after finding one reason and another for not resuming my corrections, I didn't get back to it for a full year-- until the fall of 1970.

The final 500 pages of the typescript--fully one-third of the total--I corrected in one concentrated burst of energy in three weeks in Barbados--in February, 1971.

Here are the highlights of my life from the time of the last Hawkins interview (February 8, 1968) to February, 1971:

1968

1968 was a good year for Random House and its affili- ates--Knopf and Pantheon. Highlights of the Random House list were Adam Smith's The Money Game, Abba Eban's My People: A History of the Jews, and the publication, at long last, of our Random House Unabridged Dictionary. This dictionary represented an investment of almost four million dollars, but a substantial part of it was recouped in advance because of pre-publication