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How did you decide to do it with him?

I told him one evening that I had an idea for a really good anthology of American stories--much bigger than anything that had ever been done. And I had in mind what it came out to be--a book of some 600 to 700 pages, fifty stories. We started fooling around with the list together, and then we decided to co-edit it.

Did he do a lot of the editing? In other words, what I'm trying to find out--how much did he have to do with it?

Well, we did it together. I did the biographical notes.

I mean did he actually pick how many words of each story you were going to put in.

Oh, they were all complete stories. There were no excerpts. These were all complete stories. This was the Bedside Book of American Stories--no excerpts. I hate excerpts. I don't like synopsized books.

The Book-of-the-Month Club used our anthology. It was a very successful book. It's one of the first books that I gave my wife Phyllis--a copy of the Bedside Book. I had just about met her when that book came out. And when I married her, I got back the copy I had given her!