WONDER BOYS
MICHAEL CHABON
To Ayelet
Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t
mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank – but that’s not the same thing.
Joseph Conrad
Contents
THE first real writer I ever knew was a man who did all of his work under the name of August Van Zorn. He lived at the McClelland Hotel, which my grandmother owned, in the uppermost room of its turret, and taught English literature at Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two.