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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
John Updike: That semester I think I placed four or five more stories with them, as well as quite a number of light verse poems. Light verse was in its twilight, but I didn't know that so I kept scribbling the stuff and they kept running it for a while. So, I was kind of establishing myself as a dependable contributor and they were a paternalistic organization that tried to gather unto itself talented -- whatever -- writers. And it was funny to want to do that, because really about the only slot they had to offer was to write for "Talk of the Town," the front section. We moved in, a little family of three into Riverside Drive, and I began to write these stories, and discovered I could do it, and had kind of a good time doing it. You went around in New York and interviewed people who attended Coliseum shows -- kitchen appliances or whatever -- and I was very good at making something out of almost nothing. But, I thought after two years that maybe I had gone as far as I could with "The Talk of the Town" as an art form and I felt New York was a kind of unnatural place to live. I had two children at this point, and my wife didn't have too many friends and wasn't, I didn't think, very happy. Well in the '50s one didn't think too hard about whether or not your wife was happy, sad to say, but even I could see that, so I said, "Why don't we quit the job for a while." I thought they'd take me back if it didn't work out, and I'll try to freelance up in New England, so there is where we went. We moved to a small town in New England and I never had to go back because I was able to support myself.
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Gore Vidal
National Book Award
Gore Vidal: It was a book about the absolute normality of "same-sexuality," as it was sometimes called. Remember, I spent all my life not only in boys' schools, but here I am stuck in three years of the Army. I knew exactly what went on in the real world. It was Walt Whitman who said, "No one will ever know what goes on in armies." Everybody thought it was the bloodshed and so on. Whitman was after different game. I knew what went on in the real world, and I thought, well, nobody would write about it.
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Bert Vogelstein
Cancer Researcher
One of my first patients was a little girl who was diagnosed with cancer. Actually, I diagnosed her cancer. Her parents brought her into the clinic because she looked pale and she was bruising, and a few simple tests showed that she had cancer. The little girl was only four at the time, and the look on her parents' face is something that has indelibly etched in my mind. It was terrible in the sense that I couldn't tell them anything about their daughter's disease. I couldn't tell them 'why' or 'what.' I could offer some encouraging words about some therapies that may potentially help, but what they really wanted to know was, "Why?"
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Bert Vogelstein
Cancer Researcher
The father of this little girl was a mathematician and I related to him quite a bit from my college days. And, he just wanted to know, why "my little girl" got this terrible disease, why her, and why this plague? And, I just shook up my hands. "I don't know, nobody knows." It's just this total black box, this thing that just struck people randomly, when they shouldn't be struck. And, right then and there it became clear to me that, if I wanted to spend my life on a puzzle, on a problem that I could apply my skills towards, that was going to be a good one.
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