A long time ago I received a letter from Rex Stout inviting me to join the Authors' Guild, a letter no doubt sent to all who had books published. I didn't join because I didn't think of myself primarily as a writer, but as an aspiring scholar who merely set out the results of investigations that, so to speak, wrote themselves. Writing was incidental, not essential. Some years later a similar letter arrived. By then, having spent several hours a day writing most days, I joined. I had become a writer, if not by accomplishment, at least by occupation. Only recently, however, have I thought of myself as a writer by vocation, as a person who cares about the quality and craft of writing as inseparable from the content of whatever I am trying to communicate. Indeed, for me, writing has become an integral part of thinking.