The idea—or, if you prefer to call it, the concept—back of The Man Who Lived Underground is half as old as my life and has slept somewhere within my heart since my childhood, awakening now and then to baffle me, to startle me, to amuse me, to fill me with new insight into myself and my environment. The whole idea is centered around the ardent and volatile religious disposition of my grandmother who died in Chicago in 1934. My grandmother lived her religion day by day and hour by hour; religion was her reality, the sole meaning in her life. The inconsistencies of her behavior were the subject of much agonizing thought and feeling on my part during at least one-half of my life; indeed, it was my grandmother’s interpretation of religion—or perhaps I should say that it was my religious grandmother’s interpretation of life—that actually made me decide to run off from home at the age of fifteen.

My mother being an invalid, I lived in my grandmother’s house and ate her bread and automatically this dependence obligated me to worship her God. My grandmother practiced the Seventh-Day Adventist religion, a form of religious ritual that encompasses and regulates every moment of living. (I sometimes wonder—even though I’ve abandoned that faith—if some of my present-day reactions are not derived, in whole or in part, from the extreme and profound effects of the emotional conditioning which I underwent at that period.) A man who worships in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church lives, psychologically, in a burning and continuous moment that never ends: The present is everlasting; the past is telescoped into now; there is no future and at any moment Christ may come again and then the anxious tension of time will be no more. . . . Those desiring a more elaborate description of this religion must go to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church itself to learn, for it is something to be felt rather than described.