I don’t think that during the first five years I was working on The Power Broker I had any contact with a single other writer of serious books. There was no writer with whom I could discuss a writing problem. By the time I was admitted to the Allen Room, moreover, my feelings about my book involved not only unreality, but doubt as well. For one thing, it seemed far too long to be a book. More and more frequently, as the piles of manuscript on my desk grew, I would calculate the words I had written (the final draft of The Power Broker—not a rough draft, the polished final draft—would be
...more
