When I started out as a writer in the 1960’s, I had to go to New York. There was no alternative. Even Boston, where I lived for a few years after college, and which had an old literary tradition, wouldn’t do; the real publishers, agents, bookstores and readers were—they had to be!—in New York. I had no idea, really, what New York was like; I’d never lived there; and I couldn’t have predicted how hostile the environment would be to me.