SOL STEIN - TYPED LETTER SIGNED 04/12/2002 - HFSID 291989

SOL STEIN
The author writes a detailed letter to Barnaby Conrad saying "Did you know that in 1986 I ghost-wrote a book called "The War Against the Terrorists: How to Win It," and "My agent is placing the play I wrote with James Baldwin way back for the Theater Guild (they wanted the black kid changed to white!)", with handwritten postscript.
Typed Letter signed: "Sol", 1 page, 8½x11. Tarrytown, New York, 2002 April 12. On personal letterhead to Barnaby Conrad. In full: "A delight to hear from you and to be in good company, including some old friends who are apparently still alive. I admire the efficiency of the mailing. Note that WritePro is one word. Hope the insertion of Stein on Writing in the header is okay. You can cut "nonfiction books" if space is a problem. I'm glad you found a new locus for the conference. Prescience: Did you know that in 1986 I ghost-wrote a book called "The War Against the Terrorists: How to Win It," a main selection of the Military Book Club and sold for six figures to paperback etc.? If only someone in the FBI and CIA had read it! Update: My agent is placing the play I wrote with James Baldwin way back for the Theater Guild (they wanted the black kid changed to white!) I've taped A&E Biography on Baldwin, due soon, and C-Span taped my talk (for broadcast Sunday, June 16 3PM eastern) at DeWitt Clinton, my high school that I visited last month for the first time in 60 years. I'm liking the novel I'm writing, have a proposal out on courtesy, and am delaying writing FirstAid for Writers I was invited to speak at the University of Bremen last November to graduate students and faculty who were raised on the idea that you were either born a genius or nothing, and that writing couldn't be taught. I must have won them over. The German edition has sold 50,000 copies (and paid for). Future: I've got four kids and now four grandkids in California, so for 2003 if you need or want the guy your street is named after to do a normal daily bedroom workshop called Chapter One (the name of the program I used to do in CA) or suchlike, I'd be pleased to come. Money is no longer an issue since I sold the old manse for 27½ times what I paid for it 36 years earlier. Do you have a copy of "How to Grow a Novel"? Be happy to send you one. Love to Mary, as ever," His handwritten postscript: "Selection very appropriate as I'm just writing a love scene for the new novel.". Sol Stein (b. 1926) was chief script writer for the Voice of America in the early 1950s. As Executive Director of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, he was an outspoken critic of Senator Joe McCarthy. He was an editor at Beacon Press, and then editor and publisher of his own firm, Stein and Day. Stein has written 9 novels, 3 plays, and 3 nonfiction works. When a Wisconsin school board launched a national campaign against his novel The Magician in 1981, Stein mailed copies to all 3,000 residents of the town. Barnaby Conrad, himself a prolific author, founded the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in 1973 and published books about the craft of writing. This correspondence almost certainly concerned the introduction to a chapter by Stein in Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life, edited by Conrad. Horizontal hold at center. Lightly creased. Lightly soiled. Ink note (unknown hand) at lower right margin. Otherwise, fine condition.