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He ran through Georgette’s collection midway in the second week and proceeded to get stinking drunk. There was not another book in the house. He had averaged two, and even three, books a day; without giving any thought to the fact that his stockpile was beginning to run low. He got very drunk. It was while he was very drunk that it suddenly hit him how much Georgette looked like most of the heroines in her Book of the Month Club collection.

When Alma came home from work and found him passed out on the throwrug in front of the divan, she blew her top that had been accumulating since he first went on this reading jag. They had quite a scene and ended up with a compromise. If she would get him books at the library, he would lay off the liquor—at least to the point of getting wall-eyed. Neither she nor Georgette had a card, but she took one out and started bringing them home to him. Most of the ones she brought were mystery stories. Being a murderer himself, he was interested in finding out more about it as far as it concerned murderers themselves, and he read a lot of them but nowhere in none of them—not even in Raymond Chandler, whom he liked best of all—could he find anything that even remotely resembled his own feelings as a murderer, and finally he got tired of looking.

It wasnt that he did not like mysteries, but after a while they got to sound too much the same—even Chandler got to sound too much the same—And besides, Chandler didnt have many books. It got to be too easy to pick the murderers. All you had to do to pick the murderers was pick out the character who seemed least likely to be guilty, and you had the murderer. And if you looked in the back of the book to find out if you were right, there wasnt enough else left to keep you interested. And after he picked the murderer, he couldnt keep from looking in the back of the book to see if he was right.

But there was another thing that took him off the mysteries, too. He remembered one day for no good reason how Jack Malloy had always talked about Jack London all the time, and how he had worshipped him almost as much as Joe Hill. The only book of Jack London’s he had ever read was The Call of the Wild. So he started Alma to bringing home London and went into him really in earnest.

Although he had to use the dictionary more often with London, he could still seem to read him faster. His writing seemed simpler. One day, when he was along toward the last of them, like John Barleycorn and The Cruise of the Elsinore, he read five in one day. Of them all, he liked Before Adam and The Star Rover the best because for the first time they gave him a clear picture of what Malloy had meant by reincarnation of souls. He thought he could see now, how there could just as easily be an evolution of souls in different bodies, just like there had been an evolution of bodies in different souls from the prehistoric times like Redeye and those, in Before Adam. It seemed to be logical. At least, it did when he was drunk.

Martin Eden, of course, was in a class by itself. He could understand why Malloy worshipped him, after he read Martin Eden. He sat quite a while that afternoon, when he finished Martin Eden, before he started the next one. He had three or four scotch-and-sodas, which he liked better even than plain whiskey now, and he could see in his mind how if he had a little luck, and just a slightly different life, he could have been a writer himself, instead of a bugler. Being a bugler was like being an actor; you had to depend on too many other people just to get a chance to work at it. But a writer, he had it all to himself.

He felt the same way, only much moreso, when he read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel which Alma just picked up for him on a hunch. When he finished that one he had had five scotch-and-sodas, and he got some pencils and a pad of Alma’s letter stationary and went out on the porch to write the story of Angelo Maggio and the Stockade.

Later on, after writing so hard he forgot to mix himself any more