Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

Caroline Gordon's excellent, sensitive and thorough historical novel [Green Centuries] deals with a period that presents peculiar difficulties for the writer of fiction. We all have a sort of stereotyped idea of the bold frontiers-man—clad in buckskins, adorned with a coonskin cap and armed with a long rifle that carries at least a mile, he moves through...