Typed letter signed and autograph questionnaire response signed : Harwich, Massachusetts, to Rust Hills, 1969 June 27.

Replying, in his letter to Rust Hills, to the four-question questionnaire concerning the author's own work; relating details of his current work, his next project and commenting at length on whether he has a long-range plan; saying "I don't write according to any program. I'm in the situation of those mythical birds that fly backwards, have no idea where they're going, but do have a notion of where they've been. And, like them, all I can do is extrapolate and project. Obviously, the most interesting part of my career thus far is what it suggests about a writer's relation to the reading public. It shouldn't come as any surprise that there's no living to be made out of writing poems. And not much of a living, out of what they call 'serious fiction'...The question arises as to whether it is possible or desirable to try a big, public novel on a broad canvas and shoot for the combination of quality and commerce. And I just don't know." replying, in the 39-question questionnaire pertaining to American writers and the work they produced in the past five years; naming "Pale Fire" as a novel written in the past five years that he feels altered the course of fiction and Nabokov as the writer whose prose style he most admires.