edmund will soften. so he went and he looked -- wilson. so he went and looked at the archiveses and saw it was a meaty project, but he also knew edmund wilson had written a lot about himself. and he spent about five years just thinking about whether he would do this or not knowing it would take him ten years to write after that at least and decided he didn't have the taste for it. he didn't really like edmund wilson. and so that fell through. and he lighted instead on saul bello who had the same background, they were both from chicago, and he was still alive at the time, and they were able to meet and so on. so this is a long way of saying that in a way the sum finds you. the subject finds you. sometimes you're not really wedded to some topic, it's not be suitable for you, and you have to wait until you find the one that does suit you. and in the case of clare, i'd finished the biography some months before of edith roosevelt and was literally opening, looking in a file that i keep. i'm an inveterate newspaper and magazine clipper about peo

she visited, magazine pieces, letters, diary entries and memoirs of important writers such as edmund wilson, malcolm cowley and the aforementioned jacobson. i also saw with my own eyes a lot of the territory that hickok covered. i recreated several of her trips, following her routes as closely as i could. the west virginia/kentucky coal country, upstate new york, northern and the middle border region -- iowa, minnesota, the dakotas. i was struck by how much remained physically from the 1930s. small town main streets haven't changed a lot, especially in the dakotas. and the gaunt, abandoned farmhouses along the back roads are a poignant reminder of the calamitous 1930s. change may be coming, though. in the times the other day, i read an article about the most desirable states for retirees looking to resettle. north and south dakota were two of the top five. [laughter] i can see this surprises you as much as it surprised me. i'm not sure what it is. maybe the oil boom in north dakota. i think it was the same article. north dakota produces a million barrels of oil a day now. in any case, in th