An interesting interview with author, David Scott Milton

My first novel, The Quarterback, was published by Dell in 1970, and therein lies a tale. I had written the book in 1960. I had been working as a waiter in a jazz club in New York City and taking a page out of one of my books made the mistake of becoming involved with a prostitute. Her pimp heard about it and began coming around the jazz club looking for me. I took my last check and lit out for Mexico. In those days you could live in Mexico for six months on less than five hundred dollars, which I did, turning out The Quarterback on my clunky Remington. I returned to New York and tried to get it published. It was quickly rejected all around town, but an editor at Dell, George Sentman, did say some nice things about it and me. "Undoubtedly you're a writer with something to offer," he said in his rejection note. "I suspect you will make it big some day-but not here at Dell." The reason I can so blithely knock this out for you is that I have the framed letter hung above my desk. Next to it is another, much shorter note, dated some seven years later, also from Dell, but from a new editor, Bob Able. It says simply: "David, we want to buy your book." How did The Quarterback go from Sentman's rejection to Able's acceptance? I had about given up on New York and was planning to move to California. I had an agent of sorts- the less said, the better-- and I asked her for all of my manuscripts. She returned everything to me-except The Quarterback. Now this is going to sound really stupid, but I went into a major panic because she had the only copy of the book! I don't know how old you are, or if you remember the days of another era, but copiers had not been invented yet, or if they had, they weren't in common use. Writers would either make carbons of their manuscripts or have them mimeographed. Mimeographing was a cumbersome and expensive proposition and carbons were problematical because every time you made a mistake on the original you had to erase it or type over it with correct-all tape or liquid, but what could you do with the carbon? The carbons invariably were so filled with smudges and typed over letters

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