Peter: That was the fall of 1960. I didn’t get to spend a great deal of time at home because my agent had put me up for a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and to my utter shock they accepted me. So shortly after coming back I was on my way out again. I have very clear memories of landing at the airport in San Francisco, looking around, and thinking “Well, here I am in California and it really is sunny, just like the pictures. Now I have to get to Palo Alto. Where’s the subway?”

Connor: I presume you eventually gave up looking for a subway. Who was your agent?

Peter: Elizabeth Otis, who was also John Steinbeck’s agent and Harper Lee’s agent. Steinbeck was her first client; she’d literally gone into business in 1929 with him, back when he was just a guy who had never sold a book, not a world-famous Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner. I was recommended to Elizabeth by the poet-anthologist Louis Untermeyer, and his wife Bryna Ivens, who was fiction editor of Seventeen magazine. A couple of years before, when I was 14 or 15, I’d sent a story in to Seventeen. The magazine didn’t buy it, of course, but Bryna thought it was interesting and decided to track me down‌—‌something I’d accidentally made difficult by forgetting to put a return address on the envelope. Luckily for me the Bronx postmark was readable, and in those days all the Beagles in the borough were related to one another. She called the first one listed in the phone book and pretty soon she found me.

Connor: Your short story must really have been something. That’s not a typical reaction to get from a magazine editor.

Peter: I don’t really remember it now‌—‌I think it might have been a Western with some fantasy elements. What matters is that Bryna and Louis took me under their wing and introduced me to all the people they knew. I was just a kid in high school and I was meeting Norman Mailer, and Charles G. Jackson‌—‌he wrote The Lost Weekend‌—‌and even Arthur Miller and his brand-new bride, Marilyn Monroe, who never took her eyes off Miller and smelled wonderful. They also introduced me to Elizabeth, who took me on as a client when I was 17. We became so close that she was practically another aunt. Elizabeth loved young writers, and she spent a good deal of time with me, taking me out to lunch, looking at my latest story or poem or whatever I’d come up with. She knew I was still a long way from being someone she could sell, but she treated me like a real author anyway. That was very important.

Connor: It wasn’t that long before you went pro. You placed a couple of stories during your first years in college, and Elizabeth sold A Fine and Private Place for you right away once you finished it.

Peter: She looked out for me, is what she did. I remember that Doubleday made the first bid, but Elizabeth, who was a bit of a proper lady, waited and didn’t accept it. She didn’t think Doubleday was the right house for a very young writer. She wanted a bid from Viking instead, because she thought they’d be more serious about the book and about me. And somehow she got it. Elizabeth usually found a way to get her authors what she wanted. I certainly would never have been a Stegner Fellow without her. It would never even have occurred to me to apply.