Walter Bode

I've been in book publishing for decades, mostly as an editor. I was editor-in-chief of Grove Press, a senior editor at Harcourt, and I began my career at the Viking Press, for which I am eternally grateful. Books I've edited have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Casey Award for Best Sports Book, the Lambda Award for Best Fiction, the Whitbread Award for Biography (UK), and the Gold Dagger for Best Mystery Novel (UK). Authors I've worked with include Robert Bausch, Joel Brinkley, Susan Brownmiller, Paul Chutkow, Kirk Douglas, Roger Kahn, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, Howard Fast, David Mamet, and Lewis Sorley.

The second half of my time working with books has been as a freelance editor and writer. I've ghostwritten five books, all of them nonfiction, so this is my first fiction and the first published under my own name. When I was an acquiring editor, I wanted to initiate a book about the legacy of the sixties, what ideas and dreams grew then and flourished, and which ones were starved of oxygen and forgotten. David Mauer's enthusiasm and support encouraged me to to attempt the investigation of that idea in fiction. It would not have been written without his help.