A press release from Bruce McAllister:
In 1963 a cocky high school student, tired of the “symbol hunting” in his literature classes, decided he’d find out the truth once and for all by sending a crude symbolism questionnaire to 150 of the world’s most famous writers: Jack Kerouac, Ayn Rand, Isaac Asimov, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Harlan Ellison, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, Arthur C. Clarke, Norman Mailer, William Golding, Pearl Buck, Lloyd Biggle, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote and countless others. Because he wanted to be a science fiction writer (he’d just published his first story in Fred Pohl’s Worlds of If and seen it reprinted in Judith Merril’s “year’s best”), 30% of the writers he sent the questionnaire to were science fiction writers. To his surprise, 50% of the writers (including all of the science fiction writers, generous souls that they were) answered. Their answers were not what he’d expected, however—a veritable Zen lesson—and would affect his life as writer and teacher. The whole story—with a number of scanned questionnaire responses—just went up at the Paris Review‘s blog here: www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-symbolism-survey.
That high school student was f&sf writer Bruce McAllister. After years of sitting on those letters, not knowing what to do with them—how to write about them in any way that truly captured the spirit of the responses—he’d like to get the word out. And in the process do what he didn’t do at age 16: Thank those, still living, who took the time to answer.
—Bruce McAllister
P.S. Posts about this project are on my Facebook page (www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=519771469) for anyone who’d care to friend.