The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Hazards and Sources of Writing: Difference between revisions

{{MR03}}

There’s nothing more boring than a speaker who starts to talk about a writing award and quickly reveals that he knows nothing about it. But it so happens that the Hopwood Awards really do have a well-deserved fame because they were the first significant college literary awards in the country. In the years when I went to Harvard, from 1939 to 1943, we always used to hear about them and wish we had awards of that sort at Harvard, at least those of us who were certain we were going to be writers. In 1946, the year I got out of the Army, I lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and in the same brownstone, which had only four apartments in it, lived Arthur Miller. I soon learned from his and my friend Norman Rosten that Miller had won a Hopwood Award. That was the first thing I knew about him. He had a play on Broadway that year called ''All My Sons'' and that was the year he was writing ''Death of a Salesman'' and I was writing ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]''. We used to meet occasionally in the hall when we went down to get our mail. Those days Miller was a shy man and I was fairly shy myself and we would just mutter a few words to each other and try to be pleasant and then go our separate ways. I think I can speak with authority about Miller’s reaction, I know I can about my own: each of us would walk away and say to himself, “That other guy, he ain’t going to amount to nothin’.”