He was twenty-nine years old, and the father of three young children. (A fourth, Delinah, died shortly after her birth in 1977.) For seven years he’d been working as a firefighter in Oxford, the county seat. Before that, and also on his offdays from the fire department, he’d worked as a grocery sacker, housepainter, hay hauler, pulpwood cutter and hand-loader, fence builder, bricklayer’s helper, carpenter, carpet cleaner, truck driver, forklift driver, dockworker, pine-tree planter, timber deadener, surveyor’s helper, plumber, and answering-service employee. The cumulative weight of these jobs was sapping him; his own life, as thirty loomed, was beginning to feel stunted. His father had worked as a sharecropper then a factory worker before dying at the age of forty-six, a destiny Larry didn’t wish to inherit. “I didn’t want to work with my back for the rest of my life,” he later told an interviewer. “I didn’t want to remain poor. I wanted my children to have better opportunities than what I had. I wanted to work for myself. I saw people work their whole lives in factories, standing on concrete forty hours a week, and I didn’t want that life. I wanted more than that from life.”

The means to that end, he thought, might be writing. As Larry would later concede, this scheme of his was, at first, almost tragicomically naïve. Merit of the work notwithstanding, fiction pays dividends the way slot machines do: lavishly for some, meagerly for others, none for most. The Man Booker Prize, as I write this, has just been awarded to the northern Irish novelist Anna Burns, for her third novel; she relied on food banks to sustain her during its writing. But Larry had more than just these structural odds stacked against him. Aside from school assignments, he’d never written before: not as a child, not as a teen, not ever—he was starting from scratch. The last piece of writing he’d done, a senior term paper about deer hunting, earned him an F, derailing his high-school graduation. Hence Mary Annie’s dry, muted response when Larry announced his intention to write: “Oh yeah?” A shrug. “Well … okay.”

The killer bear novel—all 327 single-spaced pages of it (“I didn’t even know about double-spacing,” he’d later say)—came bouncing back from publishers, as did the next four novels he wrote. (As with first loves, however, Larry never quite forgot that first novel; you’ll see it affectionately lampooned in his story “The Apprentice.”) The short stories he wrote suffered the same boomerang fate. “I know I’m ignorant of things like theme and mood, grammar in places, the basic things,” he wrote to the editor Gordon Lish in 1983, upon receipt of a rejection. “You’re talking to a twelfth-grade flunkout here.”