Many of you have written to tell me about some unexpected train of events set off by the appearance of a story in TIME. Here are three current examples, all of them involving authors who can credit TIME with getting them started or encouraging them to keep going.

Four years ago Norah Berg, self-styled "The Beachcomber," of Ocean City, Wash. wrote to tell us about the lively little community of shore-dwellers whose members, she said, "live in shacks and spend their time reading, fighting and drinking home-brew," as well as engaging in heated debates about the material they read. In her letter, printed in this space, Mrs. Berg said that she would like to write a book about them, if she "could more aptly portray the lives of these people."

Recently Mrs. Berg wrote me again--and she had written the book. Following publication of her letter in TIME, representatives of several publishers encouraged her to write a book about Ocean City. So she tried it. After writing three drafts, she appealed to Charles Samuels, who co-authored His Eye Is on the Sparrow with Ethel Waters. He read the script, went out to spend six weeks with the Bergs, helped rewrite the book. Titled Lady on the Beach, it was published by Prentice-Hall in November, has just gone into its third printing.

Lady on the Beach is the story of Norah and her husband, Old Sarge, who left the city to settle down to a quiet life of beachcombing, clam digging, crabbing, reading and talking in the down-at-the-heels seaside community--a "poor man's Paradise." But Norah and her Old Sarge no longer have the quiet and contentment they once sought. Says Book Critic Lewis Gannett in the New York Herald Tribune: "It's fun to read. But Norah says the letter in TIME brought a host of tourists down the new improved highway to Ocean City ... I suspect that Norah has discovered that the one sure way to end isolation is to write about it."

To his own chagrin, Sarge made the same discovery. Beset with visitors, he grumbled: "Writing that letter to TIME was the dumbest thing you ever did!"

Not long ago I heard from another TIME-reader who was also in the throes of writing a book. She is Mrs. Willa Thompson Trierweiler, and she had just returned to her home in Echternach, Luxembourg, after a long stay in a Swiss hospital, when she wrote me. She found a stack of copies of TIME awaiting her, and proceeded to go through them. One article that caught her attention was the letter I wrote to you about TIME'S Quebec correspondent, Roger Lemelin (TIME, Aug. 18), and she was struck by the number of ways in which his experiences paralleled her own.

Wrote Mrs. Trierweiler: "I also broke my ankle skiing last April--the left one, too. And I am still in bed--six months! And I also have four children. And I am also writing a novel! I'm typing the darn thing for the third time. Someone told me to leave out the sex, so that I did. Another told me to remove the religion, so I did that, too. Now all that is left is love and the Lake of Thun! . . .

"It's always good to be made aware that others have problems too and to learn how they overcome and master them. 'Bite where the apple is good' [Lemelin's expression]--I shall start biting very hard."

Another TIME story sparked the writing of still another book. The article was about Franklin Reed, young reporter for the Houston Post, who was assigned to cover the city's draft boards, eventually got drafted himself, then wrote a column about his experiences in training camp, going overseas and, finally, serving in Korea (TIME, Oct. 13). Mrs. Richard L. Simon read the story, then handed the magazine to her husband, of the publishing firm of Simon & Schuster. "You must read this," she told him. "I'll bet Reed has a wonderful book in him."

Simon read the article, got clippings of Reed's column, and decided his wife was right. In a letter to Reed, he said: "I read the clippings yesterday and felt for the first time that I, as an American, had a bridge between the everyday life I lead and the life led by the men and boys who are fighting our fight in Korea . . . You talk in terms that hundreds of thousands can understand ... as if you are talking to your friends at a bar or in a drugstore . . or during a visit on a front porch."

Reed has written his book and it is now in the publisher's hands.

Cordially yours,

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