In quite undramatic fashion, I began by being born. Place, Los Angeles, California. Date, December 7, so few years ago that darned little has had time to happen. Ancestry, Scots-English. I weighed ten pounds, had black hair, and a strident personality, especially during the wee sma’ hours.

The next few years are somewhat hazy, except that I was very naughty and had an uncanny faculty for imitating dialect. The family was never quite sure whether it had hatched out a Chinese cook or an Italian fruit man.

At an early age I discovered books. It was a sad day for the family. It’s a mournful tradition with us that if you want to get me out of a book, you’ve got to use a good-sized percussion cap.

Presently I was put into a small school in Santa Monica. I may say, with a pardonable blush, that I was the second worst brat on the campus. The worst one had a head start—she was a year older.

This I call my beach-combing period. I lived at the shore, acquired an indelible tan and a mop of straw-colored hair—the black fuzz I started out with having apparently made a mistake. I didn’t grow scales and gills, but the fish all called me by my first name.

By this time several alarming characteristics had appeared in me. I was crazy over dogs. I’d have had a dozen or so, if the family hadn’t sternly refused to cooperate. I had a nice taste in Elizabethan oaths, garnered from pirate stories. I wavered between four desperate alternatives: whether to be a smuggler like Jim Davis,¹Jim Davis (aka The Captain of the Smugglers) is a 1911 book by English poet and author John Masefield (1878–1967) about a twelve-year-old boy whose life gets flipped turned upside down when he stumbles upon a band of savage pirates. a pirate like Blackbeard, an all-round daredevil like Douglas Fairbanks,²Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (1883–1939) was an American actor and filmmaker best known for his swashbuckling roles in silent films like The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Robin Hood (1922). who was my idol, or just to settle for Cowboys ’n’ Indians.

And I discovered “imaginative fiction.”

There was apprehensive shaking of heads among the female relations. Attempts were made to save me. But it was too late. I devoured Burroughs,³Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) was a legendarily prolific American author, writing over eighty books in thirty-six years, and best known as the creator of Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars. Haggard,⁴Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) was an English writer of adventure fiction romances set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and a pioneer of the lost world literary genre. Balmer and Wylie,⁵Science fiction and mystery writers Edwin Balmer (1883–1959) and Philip Wylie (1902–1971) teamed up for the catastrophe sci-fi novel pair When Worlds Collide (1933) and After Worlds Collide (1934). Doyle’s unforgettable “Maracot Deep,”⁶The Maracot Deep is a short 1929 novel by English writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) about the discovery of a sunken city of Atlantis by a team of explorers led by Professor Maracot. Jules Verne.⁷Jules Verne (1828–1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870). Yes, boys and girls, I was hooked. Completely and utterly.

In the meantime, I flunked Latin and algebra, acted in some school plays, fought the neighbor’s boy, and made several unsuccessful attempts to go to Mars à la John Carter.

Then we went East, and the Fateful Day arrived.

It dawned quite simply. The sun shone, the little birds were doing their stuff, all was quiet and serene. I got out of bed . . .
There was a muffled thunder of psychic drums. Boston quaked to its foundations. And I said to myself:

“Brackett, you’re thirteen. Time you thought about things. The days of piracy are over, smuggling has degenerated into boot-
legging, and cowboying seems to have lost its siren charm.
What’s it to be, the Life Work?”

Brackett struggled with this for a long time—five minutes at least. And then,

“I have it! You get good marks in Eng. Lit. You read incessantly. Composition is a snap. Writing is easy. In fact, it’s so easy it’ll be almost a pity to take money for it.

“Brackett, your future is assured. You will be a writer.”

Uh huh. Gruesome, isn’t it? My only excuse is that I was young, and no one had ever kicked me very hard.

I wrote a novel, an intensely dramatic problem piece. I wrote short stories. Then two more novels.

They made a horrible stench, burning. My one consolation is that I wrote them in longhand, which in my case is practically illegible, and I think the editors simply stuck rejection slips on them, of necessity, without reading.

We came West again. I entered school, and took a course in writing on the side. It did some good, but not much. Besides, I was bitten by the acting bug about this time and spent most of my waking hours in the school auditorium.

This eventually resulted in my placing second for dramatic reading in the Festival of Arts and Sciences, and teaching speech and dramatics for a year at an up-coast school.

I taught swimming as well during the summers, and had an idea I might be a physical instructor. But writing had become chronic. I couldn’t shake it. I turned out incredibly bad stories in every spare moment.

Now we come to the tragic, soul-searing period inevitable in the life of every struggling artist, the time when he’s sure his Muse has deserted him for good. If, indeed, the gal was ever around. In nine years I hadn’t sold a word. I was beating my head against a wall, with no way over or around. Writing was easy. Ha!

Then, just as I was poised on the edge of a cliff, with a rope around my neck, a bottle of poison in one hand and a gun in the other, Fate stepped in. I found a teacher, heaven bless him. I found a writer willing to help. I found an agent, ditto. I decided life wasn’t so bad after all.

Behold me now, laboring in my garret,⁸A small, cramped attic or top-floor room. which overlooks the city of Los Angeles. I’ve sold a dozen stories. Not much, but a beginning. And some day, maybe . . .

That just about finishes this uneventful chronicle. If physical statistics are of interest, I’m tallish, fairish, and mildly insane on the subject of beach volleyball. I still read. I like eating and sleeping, dislike hats and cats,⁹We Heathens won’t hold her dislike of cats against her. and dream of globe-trotting.

There’s just one more thing—a very important thing. I hope you enjoy—

P.S. Check out Stark Trio.