“The Pedersen Kid” was originally published in volume 1, issue 1, of MSS in 1961. It was collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (1968). It is currently most readily available in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (NYRB Classics).

Not long ago I read a collection of essays by contemporary British writers, edited by Antonia Fraser, The Pleasure of Reading (1992). The childhood experiences that brought these writers to books were remarkably similar: illness with long weeks abed, parents who read aloud, awkward appearance or shy character that sent the child to the refuge of books. Many wrote that they were perversely attracted to frightening or sordid books, disliked books with youthful chum characters, and, above all, quickly developed an insatiable greed for the worlds and people found between book covers that was only tempered in adulthood by a maturing sense of value and perhaps the knowledge that one could not read everything.

I suffered no serious childhood illness, but my mother read to me and invented stories. I learned to read when I was four and assigned characters and personalities to the letters of the alphabet, particularly the capitals, which I saw as heroic—and to numbers, eight with its treacherous personality, seven in a sweeping cape. I was drawn to the Gustav Doré illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy, turned again and again to Ugolino gnawing Ruggieri's head. I despised the girl mysteries and I read obsessively. When I was eight Jack London's Before Adam came my way, a vivid story of a prehistoric clan dominated by the brutal Red Eye who took females by force and intimidated or killed the other males. The black buckram cover influenced my choice of library books for years until I read Nordhoff and Hall's Mutiny on the Bounty bound in tropic beach-sand beige. I read ferociously all that came my way.

I suppose the indiscriminate wolfing of books might have gone on, but high-school Latin slowed reading down and I began to turn over in my mind the images and ideas that rose from the page and the words and sentences that carried them. I noticed there were styles and architectures of writing aside from rational and logical unfolding, that there were meanings that lay not on the page but in my own perception.