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Toward the end of the year, we published several books that were immediate candidates for the best-seller lists. Charles Reich's The Greening of America is the #1 national non-fiction best-seller at this very moment, and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock is #2. Other very important books on our current lists are William Nolen's Making of a Surgeon, Charles Silberman's Crisis in the Classroom, Ross Macdonald's The Underground Man, Jerome Weidman's Fourth Street East, and Marjorie Craig's Face Saving Exercises.

At the end of the year, I stepped down as Chairman of the Board and was replaced by Donald Klopfer. At the same time, my son Christopher left his job as an editor of Random House to accept a key position with the triumphant new television show “Sesame Street.” Furthermore, my wife Phyllis resigned her position as an editor at Random House and will work on a free-lance basis from this date forward. All of these steps, of course, represent further breaks in the continuity of my association with Random House.

I continue to write my “Try and Stop Me” column for King Features, to make appearances on the lecture platforms (although I intend to cut down on this from this season for- ward) and to make occasional appearances on various TV shows--David Frost, Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett.

My big ambition at this point is to write the Autobiography I have been dreaming of for a long, long time. It will include, of course, many of the stories that appear in the pages of this Oral History, but I hope to devote additional