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Also in 1965, we published At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen. That's the book that made Irwin Shaw so angry because he said that we paid more attention to Matthieson, his old friend--but our new author--than we did to him.

Then, in 1966, came Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, The Last Hundred Days and Papa Hemingway by A. E. Hotchner. That's a rather interesting story. Hotchner...we had published a rather unimportant novel by him earlier, but now he told me of his great friendship with Hemingway. He proposed to do a story of his last month or wo with Hemingway when they took a trip together, which was to be more or less parallel to the successful book that Hemingway had written of a similar journey with F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was A Movable Feast. I could tell by the way that Hotchner was talking that this was going to be rather a mean book. For a little while I questioned the propriety of doing the book and whether this was good taste or not. But, as Hotchner pointed out, Hemingway had done it to his friend Fitzgerald--and how; so why shouldn't it be done to Hemingway? In the last years of his life, Hemingway had developed some very mean and annoying traits and made a fool of himself with his “papa” routine. Lillian Ross inadvertently showed him up in her adulatory New Yorker piece. So we said, “Go ahead.” Well, Hotchner's story began to expand and finally turned out to be a whole length book about Hemingway, ending with his dissolution and his finally killing himself after going quite insane.

Well, we published it. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club