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Bennett CerfBennett Cerf
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Session:         Page of 1029

Cerf:

Raymond Weaver became a very close friend of mine.

Q:

You mean you would continue even after the course ended...

Cerf:

Well, I met through him his friend, John Burrell, who taught in Extension. Then Burrell became a friend of mine, too, and Burrell and I did together a book called The Bed-side Book of American Short Stories, which had an enormous sale. It was a Book of the Month Club choice, and it's still in the Modern Library Giant Series today. Burrell is long since dead, but his family still gets royalties from that book.

Q:

So even after you graduated, you continued to see Weaver.

Cerf:

Weaver, I guess, was the one professor I kept seeing. And then Steeves suddenly popped back into my life after I'd been publishing a few years. He wrote a detective story. It wasn't a very good one, but he brought it down to me, and I was so grateful to Steeves for what he had done for me that I published his detective story. It didn't do very much; it didn't deserve to. But it was a pleasure doing it. I was making him very happy--this austere English professor who had written this silly detective story.

Q:

I know that the last summer you were at Columbia you went to school, but did you do anything during your summers while you were at college that was significant or ought to be put on tape?





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