And, of course—the moment I thought of my grandmother—the old invisible-man idea surged up; yes, I thought, here is where I can put a man outside of life and yet let him live within life, just as my grandmother had done. Then there came surging into my mind the political suggestion and concept of the underground. I thought that such an overtone, though not explicitly expressed, could form a certain theme. In Europe today the oppressed are fighting Hitler from the underground. Next, while brooding over the idea of that white man in California who lived beneath those buildings in Hollywood, I thought of the Promethean theme, the theme of a man paying for a certain illicit knowledge that he had gotten. I felt that it would be good to have my hero, when he went underground, discover some illicit knowledge. (Later, while in the actual process of writing, I found that I could make the whole theme of stolen knowledge ironical by having Fred Daniels discover knowledge whose utmost value he would not exactly understand and on the basis of this contrive his death for a knowledge he possesses which is not of the highest value. Actually, Fred Daniels is not killed for the really dangerous knowledge he thinks he possesses, but for fear that he might betray secrets of the police department!) I remembered, too, that in the Promethean theme, we had in the death of the hero, at least, to be accurate, his punishment, an inverted assertion of the value of personality. It is only when something is worth dying for that life really becomes precious. I felt that to have my hero killed for this dubious knowledge he possessed would be a way of affirming his value; in short, I strove to make the basic theme, or ideology, of the book mean: an assertion of human hope and tenderness in a world drenched in brutality. The one thing that Fred Daniels accomplishes and exhibits is the freedom of action! As long as men have that right, the results of action will justify any attempts to save it, to protect it. Fred Daniels throws his life away, that is, when we see it from the outside; but from Fred Daniels’s point of view he emerges from the underground to communicate what he has seen, and to give testimony to what one feels is a right worth dying for. Indeed, he has the right and scope of action to feel deeply enough and long enough so that what he feels and sees acts powerfully upon him and drives him to further action. (This, incidentally, is my form of patriotism: Give men and women enough of life to feel and live, then when the time arrives to fight for life, they will feel moved to go into action with no thought of death or the dangers of action.)

Still another strand that runs through the skein of the story, suggested by overtones rather than through explicit speech, is the theme of general, individual, and personal rebellion which is taking place so constantly and often in the world today. Sometimes it goes under the name of “individual initiative,” “rugged individualism,” etc.