Minton, in turn, discovered the pages at her Upper East Side apartment. “I woke in the middle of the night and there was this story on the table. I started reading,” he recalled in early 2018, sixty years later. “By morning, I knew I had to publish it.” (Ridgewell was in line for a tidy payday for her literary scouting efforts, per a standing Putnam policy: the equivalent of 10 percent of an author’s royalties for the first year, plus 10 percent of the publisher’s share of subsidiary rights for two years.)
