When I was a boy in the late 1950s, the public library refused to stock books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were regarded as vulgar, ill-written potboilers.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I grew up, there were locked cabinets in public libraries. You needed parental permission if you were under eighteen. I was let down by the overblown reputations of some hardcore fictional works.
My first four books were not published because nobody wanted them. They were adult books, not kids' books.
I do not remember any proper children's books in my childhood. I was not exposed to them.
I devour books. But for the longest time, I refused to pay attention to genre or labels.
I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.
When I was a boy in Salem, Mass., in the 1950s, if you wanted to buy a book, you had to take a train to Boston. And when you got there, to a bookstore, there was no such thing as a science-fiction section.
I'll never forget a meeting with one publisher where they said, 'We don't publish books for teenage boys; teenage boys don't read.'
In 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs, having failed at everything else, decided to write a novel. He was then in his mid-thirties, married with two children, barely supporting his family as the agent for a pencil-sharpener business.
I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books to be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren's hands.
I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.