young life came when the mother of a friend, to whom I had lent my collection of two years of the magazine, threw the whole stack out in a frenzy of housecleaning. I've never been able to replace them. In a fit of insanity I clipped my next two years, taking out my favorite yarns—and have kicked myself at the proper intervals ever since.
My first attempt at fiction was inspired by a story in Weird Tales—probably another of Hamilton's—and even I knew that it was terrible. A fan magazine printed it later as a horrible example of what goes on before a writer gels. Not until much later did I write anything that was fit to send to an editor. Meanwhile, the Miller career has not been particularly exciting. Because arts degrees were a dime a dozen prior to 1929, I majored in chemistry at Union College, got an M.S. in 1932, and found that in those times I had to have a Ph.D. to be worth hiring. The fooling around I had done with writing came to the rescue, and by devious paths I am now in a job in which I am writing news stories, taking photographs, editing reports, sitting on committees, and writing radio scripts for the Schenectady Department of Education—and enjoying it greatly, for all it leaves precious little time to write, except in school vacations.
When I can, I like to get outdoors and soak up the wilderness. It's more than two years since I've been able to go on a camping trip in the Adirondacks, but I tried to get a little bit of the mountains into John Cawder's Wife. I have aspirations as an amateur archeologist—a small toad in a comfortable puddle—and probably would be content to spend my days scratching around with a trowel and brazenly advancing theories on the typewriter. I hope that I can put some of the fascination of this study into words for Weird Tales some day without completely outraging my scientific friends.
But this is the story of John Cawder's Wife as well as of its author. Like many of my attempts, the story started with a title that floated up out of nowhere one night and was written down for safe-keeping. Ideas began to associate themselves with it: a woman who would be the wife not only of one John
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