One day this summer—while resting from a spell of writing on a long novel—I was reading a very cheap magazine that carries no creative writing in it at all. This magazine’s purpose is to write up—in rough, reportorial style—actual crime in a straight, factual manner. (I think the history of crime in the United States is as much a part of our important history as any other phase of our lives; I know of no other act or group of actions that so gathers together the threads of personal, social, political life of the nation as crime! A crime may be likened to a sharp rent in the social cloth that reveals the texture of all the strands out of which our lives are woven.) Now I read an account—written by some newspaperman, I suppose—of how a white man, in Hollywood, California, in 1933 and 1934, lived underground, that is, dug his way beneath buildings from vacant space in the earth. At intervals he came out; but he prepared himself a rather comfortable room.

At once the idea struck me as possessing literary possibilities and I wrote a letter to Governor Olson of California—because I was afraid to trust the account printed in the crime magazine—and asked that he send me a narrative report of the outline of this man’s crime. By return mail the good governor sent me what I asked for and wished me luck if I wanted to use the material as the basis for a story. Meanwhile, I had turned the idea over and over in my mind and at least a dozen hidden memories began to grow up in me, clustering themselves around the idea of a man living underground. Several notions popped up in my mind: First, here was a way in which I felt that I could depict the religion of my grandmother. Finally, I felt that I had discovered a form that could do justice to the inner logic of her life. Here, I could push the all-too-well known Negro religious ritual into the background—I could with one blow knock off the trappings which had always branded it as funny—and get beyond the singing, the shouting, the moaning, the swooning, and the screaming sermons. Here, at last I need not fear that the outward guise would defeat what I wanted to do. I had often wondered, in thinking of my grandmother as a subject for fiction, if I could find a way of standing so far back from her life—details that linked her in the minds of the American reading public with the ludicrous aspect of primitive religion among southern Negroes—so that the details would fall away, so that the bold outlines that formed the true structure of her personality would fall into place; then and then only would one be able to see just what kind of a person she was.

So here, in the account of a crime committed by a white man, I suddenly saw where I could stand and look at my grandmother, where I could stand and point to her so that others too might see what kind of a woman she was. Now, I’ll say frankly, that I was not at all concerned with whether I wrote about a woman or a man. I imagine men and women react more or less alike to religious reality, or, if they possess a religious disposition, they react more or less alike to the world in which we live. What I was concerned with was extracting from my grandmother’s religious personality a certain way of looking at the world and putting this “way of looking” into operation in an environment. So, at once, when I heard that a man had lived underground, it occurred to me that there was where I could make what made my “grandmother tick” live and breathe, be the character a man or a woman.