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like Winston Churchill. They pick so many books by Pearl Buck that I used to call them the “Buck-of-the-Month Club.” So we sold our new find to Literary Guild, which was crazy about it. Then we showed it around Hollywood and got an enormous movie price for it from Twentieth-Century Fox. Mark Robson, who had just completed the fortune-making but disgraceful picture called Valley of the Dolls, was the producer and director. Everybody expected this to be an overwhelming success.

What happened? The book fell on its face and the picture was an even more dismal failure!

The book was a flop?

Comparatively. It did sell about 10,000 copies. I thought that it was going to sell at least 100,000.

How do you explain things like that? I guess that people simply were not interested in the story of Gandhi and they were not interested in India any more. This was in 1962, mind you, when the eyes of the world were on the Berlin crisis and the Far East. By the same token, today you can't sell a book about South America, a continent in which we should be vitally interested.

We did this year a book by one of the top editors of Look about President Frei of Chile. It's an absorbing history of modern Chile, one of the republics down in South America that is at least making an attempt at being a