SOURCE: An afterword to The Two Worlds of William March, The University of Alabama Press, 1984, pp. 316-25.

In the following excerpt, Simmonds discusses the major themes and conflicts that determined March's fiction and his life.

The novelist John Gardner, discussing the mysteries of the creative processes, considered the nature and extent of bibliotherapy, explaining in the following terms what it means so far as he is concerned:

You really do ground your nightmares, you name them. When you write a story, you have to play that image, no matter how painful, over and over until you've got all the sharp details so you know exactly how to put it down on paper. By the time you've run your mind through it a hundred times, relentlessly worked every tic of your terror, it's lost its power over you. That's what bibliotherapy is all about, I guess. You take crazy...