Legends of the Underwood #8: John D. MacDonald

I was involved in the desperate business of trying to wrest a living out of free-lance fiction for magazines... During those first four months of effort, I wrote about 800,000 words of unsalable manuscript, all in short-story form. This is the equivalent of ten average novels. Had I done a novel a year, it would have taken me ten years to acquire the precision and facility I acquired in four months.

—John D. MacDonald in The House Guests (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1965)

(Eighth in a series.)