"I was born on February 25, 1914, in Los Angeles, California, and I was raised there before smog and freeways. My father was born there also and his mother before him in 1853. We moved around a little, trying to find a place where an asthmatic child--me--could breathe.

"My family life as a child was unremarkable, although my grandfather was a gold camp judge, and both he and my mother were poets. I started writing for pleasure when I was about fourteen. I think I wrote out my dissatisfactions--just as a canary sings out of loneliness.

"Asthma was one of the big realities of my childhood. It never quite killed me, but it ended my college career, and I moved to a mountain cabin where I started writing. Indirectly I owe a lot to ill health. It kept me from becoming a third-rate newspaperman and forced me into a profession I...