SHIPPENSBURG UNIVERSITY, LOCATED AN HOUR WEST OF HAR-risburg in the Cumberland Valley of south-central Pennsylvania, was founded in 1871. It was approved as a teachers college in 1926. When Dean went to school there, it was known as Shippensburg State College. At that time, the campus covered one hundred acres; it has since doubled in size. The emphasis was on teaching and quality interaction between teachers and students, with the idea of developing a community in which the student is central. When Dean attended, there were around three thousand students.
To enroll in the English program, with secondary certification for teaching, meant that Dean would take basic courses in composition, psychology, grammar, and teaching methods. Then he would learn about such writers as Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickens. By the time he was a senior, he would be studying specific literary genres and literary criticism. Along the way, he would learn various teaching philosophies and techniques.
Dean chose Shippensburg in part because it was inexpensive. He had worked part of the summer at Acme and part in another grocery store called Lowry’s. At school, he briefly washed dishes in the dining room to continue to help pay expenses.
The other consideration was that Shippensburg was close enough to Bedford for him to go home weekends — as long as his father came to pick him up — to see Gerda and his mother. He had a car, but the school did not allow cars on campus for freshmen.
As Dean went off to college, Gerda thought they might drift apart, but it was not long before he asked her to marry him. It had taken some time, but he had finally put together enough money to buy a ring and pop the question. “It surprised me,” she says, but she accepted.
Dean’s mother was a little worried by the proposal. “She was in shock,” Dean admits. “She assumed it was going to be a ‘necessary wedding.’ I think it took her a couple of months to believe that we didn’t have to get married, and then I think she was happy.”
It was difficult for them to see each other regularly because Dean had to rely on someone else driving him. They kept in touch by writing daily letters. “We had a huge collection of letters,” Dean remembers, “and most of them were funny because not that much would happen to us in a day, so we’d make up stuff.” By his second year, he had brought back his black and white ‘52 Buick. “I think that car had only cost a couple hundred dollars, but it worked.”
During his first two quarters, he resided in a dorm built in 1870 known as Old Main. His roommate was Harry Recard, a history major. “Dean and I got along very well from the first,” Harry states. “We have a similar sense of humor, which is a little weird. You had to be quick-witted to pick up on it. We could cut someone off without them ever knowing it. We’d have a hell of a laugh and they’d be wondering what was going on. Dean was shy, but sure of himself. We went through Orientation together, but he would not participate in hazing activities. He was that sure of himself.”
“You could be thrown out of college if you got too many demerits for violating hazing rules,” Dean explains. “The first week was Hell Week and you had to do all kinds of things, but they overplayed it. They made us all stand in the gym one day during a very hot September, and there was no air-conditioning. We had to run in place with our little beanies on and then stand shoulder to shoulder with all that body heat. People started passing out and some of them got very ill. Whoever was running the hazing left them on the floor. It quickly reached the point at which I refused to do any more, and I started piling up demerits. I saw no educational value or character building in any of it. It was pretty stupid stuff. It was like turning over the university to the most witless elements.”
What really annoyed him was that students were not allowed to go home for the first month. He had a girlfriend whom he wanted to see, so he defied the rules and went home three of the four weekends. “Of course, I’d get in trouble,” he admits, “but because they overplayed their hand, hazing was drastically reduced in scope after that year.”
The dorm room Dean shared with Harry was long and narrow. “It was very small,” Harry remembers. “You walked in and the closet was on your immediate left, which made it offset in the room. There was a bunk bed behind that, longways, and there were two desks that were lengthwise in the room. You could barely get up out of bed and walk straight out the door.” Dean had the top bunk and Harry, who was larger, took the bottom.
Harry immediately got Dean involved in playing pinochle, which grew into tournaments involving other boys on the floor. Generally they played in someone else’s room, using the top of a trunk. “We played a lot of pinochle,” Harry admits.
“In my first year there,” Dean recalls, “I was just a get-by kind of student. My major desire was to become the best pinochle player there ever was, and I’d never even heard of pinochle until I went to college. Harry and I were killer partners. We were tough to beat. We had these tournaments that would start at five o’clock in the afternoon, and everyone would go down to the student cafeteria, called the Raider Room, to get sandwiches and Cokes. We’d bring dinner back to the room and these games would go all night.”
Linda Farner Holtry met Dean during that time in the student lounge. She was a “townie,” but she liked to hang around on campus. She knew Dean from their educational psychology course, where they would pass notes. She liked him, but thought he was shy. “He always seemed to be by himself,” she says. “He wasn’t a joiner, but I remember that he played a lot of cards.”
In 1963, the civil rights movement became more pronounced and Martin Luther King was arrested in Alabama. Over two hundred thousand freedom fighters demonstrated in Washington, D.C. Then in November, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Most people over a certain age can recall exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.
“The word came through just as my father was picking me up for the holiday break,” Dean relates. “I had returned back from my last class and was scrambling to go pack. I walked in the room and Harry was sitting there. He was just shaking his head and in kind of a weird state, and I asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘Kennedy’s been shot.’”
Dean was stunned. As he was riding home in the car, he turned up the radio and heard the announcement that Kennedy was dead. “It had a profound impact on all of us who were old enough to react to it emotionally and intellectually. It was a fundamental event — especially if you were in your teens or early twenties — that shattered forever the idea that there is any such thing as stability. It introduced to you the notion that everything can change and it can change very suddenly. Since then, I’ve always been aware of how easily a stable society can turn into something else.”
His first year at school, Dean experimented with various activities, such as playing in a band. “I knocked around on drums, and several people who played instruments got together and we actually became a little group and played a couple of things — but not for any money to speak of. We had aspirations — which evaporated quickly — of doing something more.”
He also knew some people on the college radio crew. “I was involved with that,” he says, “but not on a long-term basis. I’ve always found radio sort of fascinating. I think I’m a frustrated performer.”
Since childhood he had loved to draw and he continued to dabble in artistic ventures. “I had this idea that I might someday become an artist, an illustrator, and when I was in college, I did some drawings and actually sold a few pieces. People paid about fifteen dollars for them. But at some point, I realized that while I had some talent in that direction, I would never be able to develop it the way I would have liked. I did some watercolors, too, and I liked to work with pastels. I was still drawing until my junior or senior year in college, but once I realized that I would never be first-rate, I lost interest. I had a friend at Shippensburg, Jeff Steele, who was a terrific artist, and if I couldn’t be as good as he was — then forget it.”
There would come a time when Dean would be famous enough to contribute his quirky drawings to raise money for charity.
“I also wrote a lot of bad poetry in college. That form of writing fascinates me because of the condensation of the language. My interest in verse comes out of reading Poe. I enjoyed his insistent rhythms. Poetry has played a tremendous role in shaping the kind of writer I am. I like extremely vigorous poetry, like Yeats and T. S. Eliot. I also read Emily Dickinson because of the enormous condensation of emotion in her language. She wrote very short pieces and some of them carry tremendous punch.”
Dean showed his mother some of what he had written. “I can’t remember any response,” he says. “When she realized I was drawn toward being a writer, she possibly saw it as one of these crazy kind of dreams that people on my father’s side of the family have but which they never pursue in any meaningful way. I think it scared her, so she didn’t encourage it. She had no comment, as if she was almost afraid to think about it.”
For a brief period, he joined the Newman Club, which was for students of the Roman Catholic faith. According to the 1964 yearbook, they devoted themselves “to wholesome activities.” Dean had decided to explore the religion in which Gerda had been raised.
“I became a Catholic after I met Gerda, but not because of her,” he clarifies. “It wasn’t to marry her. She didn’t require that. College is a time in your life when you’re searching for things. From dating Gerda, I had seen these large families in the Italian community that all seemed interknit, while my own family had been sort of shattered. On my father’s side, people just didn’t even relate, and on my mother’s side, there was always some conflict.”
He had been impressed with the positive effect that attending Mass seemed to have on their family life. “I didn’t see any husband who drank to excess. They all liked their wine, but I didn’t see any of these uncles who were drunk or who didn’t work to support their families. Generally people got along with each other and there was all this stability. I hadn’t had much of that in my own life. So on my own, without telling Gerda, I found a class at the Catholic Church in Shippensburg for instruction.
“Now, in those days the Mass was in Latin. I fell in love with the beauty of it all, and also I began to see why it provides a certain structure that’s good for people. I finally became Catholic, and that was before I really knew that we were going to marry.”
Dean began to read Catholic philosophers. “During my Catholic conversion, I read Saint Augustine quite a lot. He fascinated me because he was the first person I came across who brought intellectualism to writing about religion. It’s that aspect of Catholicism that I’ve found most redeeming. Many years later, I liked to read Malcolm Muggeridge for some of the same pleasures, and I also read G. K. Chesterton. I had found his Father Brown series first and got interested in his mind.”
The religious thinker who most impressed him was the thirteenth-century Catholic philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas, who harmonized faith and reason. Known for his philosophy of intellectualism, and influenced by Aristotle and Augustine, Thomas Aquinas represented the high point of medieval Scholasticism in his Summa Theologica. According to him, God’s revelation is fundamentally rational and is revealed to some degree in all creation. All truth stems from God’s personality, and divine revelation never contradicts logic. Although Dean was to change some of his attitudes toward God and the Church, these ideas would remain fundamental to him.
The Catholic idea of free will was also appealing to Dean. He liked to view decision-making as an exercise of the spiritual faculty, and he particularly embraced the notion of choice and responsibility. Even when a person seemed to be acting under subconscious influences, choice was exercised somewhere in the process. Thus, no one was really off the hook for his actions. No one had a good excuse for not acting morally — not even his father.
As soon as possible that first year, Dean found a room to rent off campus. “I wasn’t made for institutional living,” he admits. “I hated the dorms.” He went to a gray two-story colonial house almost a mile from campus where Fay and Albert Bitting rented a room to male college students. Fay Bitting approved of Dean at once.
“Dean was special,” she recalls. “He came in and inquired about a room, and there was something about how he presented himself that I liked. He had nice manners and a sense of humor, so I showed him the house. And after he moved in, he always paused to talk a little. He didn’t just rush out the door.”
The second-floor room that she showed Dean had two single beds, one for him and one for a roommate. It was painted blue, with white curtains framing three large colonial windows. She also supplied a bureau and a desk for each, and fresh towels. The bathroom was down the hall and they had a small kitchenette to use, as well as a room in which to sit and read.
“I had a roommate who was different from me,” Dean says. “He had something like eleven pairs of shoes and forty-eight ties. He knew exactly what to wear with everything, and college for him meant getting into the right fraternity. He was a dedicated frat man.” Eventually the roommate moved out and Dean had the room to himself. Whenever he wrote stories, he asked Mrs. Bitting to read them and tell him what she thought. “Give it your best,” she would encourage him. “It’ll grow by leaps and bounds.”
Dean stayed at the Bitting’s house for the rest of his time at Shippensburg. Years afterward, he kept in touch with his former landlady and sent her a signed copy of every one of his books. When she saw him again after he had become successful, she was pleased that he had not changed much from the boy she had known. “He was so down to earth,” she says.
At the end of Dean’s first year, he was nearly kicked out of school. He had one more final to take in math — a course in which he was doing only average work. “I wasn’t feeling good the day before and the next morning when I woke up I couldn’t move. I literally couldn’t even lift my arms. I gradually began to be able to move, but I couldn’t stand up. I was running a fever, but I managed to crawl to the phone. It was a Friday and my father was supposed to be picking me up, so I called to see if he was really going to come because once in a while he would forget. I missed the final and when my father came around three o’clock, I was barely able to get into the car. When I got home I was in such bad shape, I couldn’t even hold down water. I was severely dehydrated. My mother took me to the hospital and the doctors hooked me up intravenously. I was there for sixteen days with an exceptionally severe case of mononucleosis.”
Gerda and Florence visited him, but for the first few days, he did not even realize where he was. His fever was high and he had to be closely watched. He finally recovered, but he was too weak for the remainder of the summer to try to find a job.
Then Shippensburg sent a notice that Dean had missed his final, had not reported his departure, and therefore should not return. Although his mother called to explain what had happened, the dean of student personnel was adamant that he was not allowed to leave campus without the proper notification. When Dean returned to school to plead his case, he was informed that his grades were poor and he had failed to follow procedure, so there seemed little point in readmitting him.
“I had to write letters to my various teachers,” he remembers, “asking if they would step forward on my behalf. The only one who did was the math teacher whose exam I had missed. He wrote a letter saying that I shouldn’t have been kicked out and that I might have gotten a C. With that, they let me back in — provisionally.”
Little did they know that they would one day award him an honorary doctorate!
As Dean progressed in his major, he took three creative writing courses, in which he was expected to produce samples of his own work. “A creative writing teacher can be of significant value to a student during the early stages of his growth,” he later stated in a book on writing.1 However, he disagreed with them that the process was communal, and ever afterward he distrusted the idea of writing groups. “I’ve always advised young writers who get together in these groups not to do it,” he explains, “because what you have to sell is your unique view of the world, your voice, and what writers generally criticize about another writer is his or her style.”
During the early sixties, college English departments emphasized realism and naturalism. Professors elevated mainstream writing as relevant, timeless, and meaningful. Critical praise showed a retrospective tendency, looking to past works for artistic merit. As Dean learned about the writers whom his professors wanted him to emulate, he continued to read science fiction, fantasy, and some mysteries. Many of his teachers viewed such genres with disdain, however. That was not the place from which ideas of substance derived, they insisted, and they encouraged students to model their work on the fiction of authors of established “greatness.” Dean listened to this, read these authors, watched his classmates write to please the professors, and then went off in his own directions. To write simply for the grade struck him as cynical. Instinctively he knew that the best path was to follow his heart and write what he liked to read.
Reactions to his stories were often condescending. “Everything was scorned except what was considered ‘literary fiction,’ and when I would turn in a writing sample it would be in one of these genres that they dismissed.” Most of his teachers urged him to aspire toward what they considered higher standards, but he resisted the pressure. In some ways, college was a good training ground for similar struggles in the years to come.
Dean made friends with other of his English professors. He especially liked those who were passionate about their subjects, and skillful in communicating that passion. O. Richard Forsythe, who was director of English Education and Communication Arts, was one. His books include Games Teens Play with Adolescent Literature and Practical Remedies for English Teachers in Distress. He taught Early American Literature, World Literature, Literary Criticism, and basic composition courses. He remembers having Dean in his course on Teaching English in Secondary Schools.
“I remember the major project that he did,” Forsythe states. “It was a three-week summer course. Students had to have a unit plan for what they would teach and Dean’s was on science fiction. It was very well done and I commended him on it.”
Richard would throw parties and invite students to his home. “I let them call me by my first name,” he says, “and the kids appreciated that. Dean came in to my office and we had some very lengthy discussions. I remember that he was atheistic in college. He used to be incredibly cynical, although I never saw him as a radical. I shied away from having these discussions too often because sometimes when people are cynical, you have to let them be cynical. He had a friend, Paul, and they used to come over. We would all get smashed. Dean saw teachers as human beings. I think the impact I had on him was about the rapport we achieved. I was a teacher and he was going to become one. That put us on equal levels.”
John Bodnar, another professor, also became a good friend. Dean, as a junior, took Bodnar’s American Novel course, which included The Deerslayer; Moby Dick; Sister Carrie; Look Homeward, Angel; Maggie, A Girl of the Streets; The Old Man and the Sea; and The Catcher in the Rye.
“I spent more time on Look Homeward, Angel,” Bodnar explains, “because I was crazy about the work and the language. It’s sheer poesy. Those opening symbols: ‘A stone, a leaf, a door …’ You open a door into life, and then there’s the uncertainty of your life as if it were a leaf driven by the wind. And then a stone, which is about developing a good solid sense of principles to guide you through life. I emphasized symbolism, character development, and morality (good versus evil); for example, in Moby Dick, I stressed the numerous levels of meaning. ‘Look at the white whale in Moby Dick as God,’ I might say, ‘and look how each chapter refers to the Bible.’ Shippensburg is a fundamentalist area and we professors had to be careful of what we said; but I wanted them to think, even if literary devices and philosophical theories upset them.”
His style was to walk up and down between the rows of seats and make eye contact to elicit answers from the class. “Dean was attentive,” he recalls. “He sat in the fourth seat from the front, in the third row from the main aisle. If I looked at him questioningly, he responded with insight, but succinctly. He never missed a class and he earned an A for the course.”
During those days, most of literary criticism was influenced by Freudian theory. Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis, postulated the existence of three basic forces that govern a person’s actions: the id (the unconscious instinctual drive), the ego (the executive structure of the psyche that connects with the real world), and the superego (the moral conscience). He maintained that the primary motivating factor in behavior is the sexual instinct, or libido, and that most neurotic behaviors derive from repressed sexual drives. He also categorized the psychotic behaviors. Although his theories were controversial, they filtered beyond psychology into other disciplines, notably literary theory.
“Freudianism and determinism were the bases for critical analysis of many works in the sixties,” says Bodnar.
Between his English courses and a few psychology courses, Dean received substantial exposure. “I was totally swept up in Freud,” he admits. “His ideas made a very deep impression, and when I found something that intrigued me like that, I did outside reading. That’s why so many of my early books are saturated with it, but my attitude has evolved since that time.”
At first, Dean set his sights on a teaching career, with writing as a sideline. His stint at student teaching was at the eighth grade level, but he had a problem with the woman who was his supervisor. She disliked him because of the length of his hair — which, in fact, was relatively short for the time — and for his sense of humor. “She put me through hell. She said I was ill prepared, I should never teach, and I should be taken out of this program.” There were other teachers at the school, however, who sided with him and assured him that her reports would not count for much. Dean eventually got his certification.
Back in 1962, the U.S. Military Council had been established in Vietnam. By the time Dean was a sophomore two years later, the war had escalated and the U.S. was sending more aid. Johnson had been elected president following Kennedy’s assassination, and even as the Beatles burst upon the scene, there were dark undercurrents about what the U.S. was doing in southeast Asia. Student demonstrations began against U.S. bombing in Vietnam and many young men protested and even dodged the draft. Dean was not among them.
“While I was in college, I was deferred,” he explains, “but it was at the height of the Vietnam War, and as I was nearing graduation, I had to go for a physical.”
To his surprise, the doctors showed great interest in his feet. Three different doctors had a look at them. His feet were narrow and on each foot he had two oddly shaped toes.
“Don’t you have a foot problem?” they asked. “Pain when you walk any distance?”
“No,” Dean responded.
Then he filled out a psychological test and was called in to talk to a doctor later in the day. He was nervous, wondering if he was going to be sent overseas. The doctor beckoned him into a private room and Dean saw his file on the man’s desk.
The doctor looked at him and asked, “Have you had problems through your life with discipline?”
Dean thought it was a weird question. He had no juvenile record and he had always been a shy, quiet kid. He shook his head and answered, “No.”
The man continued to look at him for several long seconds and then asked, “If you were given orders, do you think you would find it easy to follow them?”
Having no idea what the right answer might be, Dean simply said, “I wouldn’t have any problem.”
“In school,” the man went on, “do you have problems doing assignments? Do you turn things in on time?”
“I’m about to graduate from college,” said Dean. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be graduating.”
Dean’s interrogator gave him a long stare and said, “I don’t think it would be good for either you or the army if you were drafted. What do you think?”
Dean had no idea what to say. He sat there thinking that whatever answer he gave would land him in Vietnam. He simply said, “I don’t know.”
The doctor nodded and told him, “That’s all.”
Dean left the office. When he got his classification, he was not A-1, which meant he was not prime material for the army. He thought it had something to do with his feet, but he was never sure. “I guess they thought, ‘Foot problem, won’t fit in an army boot,’ or whatever. I never got called to serve, but if I’d have been drafted, I would have gone. It didn’t seem like you really had a choice. I’d say I was against the war, but I didn’t participate in protests. I wasn’t a radical about it.”
As young men in the sixties began to grow their hair longer to express defiance and individualism, Dean kept his relatively short. “I was looking for a teaching job. In those days, you had to have a teacher image. You wore a suit and tie to school.”
He also shunned the use of drugs such as LSD that were becoming a fad among college students. “Drugs always terrified me,” he explains. “The example of my father with alcohol was daunting. I could look around at the kids who were doing drugs and it was very obvious where this life was going to end up, so that never had any appeal to me. I liked the music of the time, which was rebellious, but most of the people I hung around with were not hugely political. We were at a small Pennsylvania teachers college. We were in the middle of Amish country.”
He did participate in one radical act that he recalls. “There was a sit-in at the president’s office. We were protesting women’s dorm hours. It was no big political protest. During the week, women had to be back in their dorms at nine-thirty and on weekends they could stay out until eleven-thirty. I didn’t even date anyone there, but this was this big protest.
“So we all went in and we thought we were going to shut down the university, but unfortunately we picked a time when the president was about to go to South America on a vacation. He was leaving that afternoon, so he couldn’t have cared less whether we sat in his office or not. When the whole group showed up — at was probably thirty or forty people sitting in the outer office — he sent out soft drinks and coffee, and asked if everyone was comfortable. You could hardly be rebellious when you were being sent soft drinks and coffee.”
Politics aside, Dean’s primary interest was writing.
As Dean studied the great writers, he had ambitions of his own. To test the waters, he sent a short novel that he had written to the Scott Meredith Agency, which evaluated manuscripts for a fee. He got back a critique. “Even in college,” he says, “I was smart enough to realize that they didn’t even read what I’d sent them. This was based on the fact that the advice sent was in ignorance of some of the story line.” Never again would he pay a fee, but as it turned out, this agency was the first to represent him as a professional.
In his junior year, Dean surprised some of his English teachers. To a nationwide college writing competition sponsored by The Atlantic Monthly, one of his writing teachers, Mabel Lindner, submitted an essay he had written and a dark suspense story called “The Kittens.” Although he had written the story for a composition course, he had shown it to her, but he was unaware that she had then entered it in this contest.
“The Kittens” is about a girl named Marnie whose father had drowned a litter of kittens and assured her that God had taken them to live with him. He is a religious man who reads Bible passages and teaches Sunday School, so she trusts him. Still, she cannot understand why God had chosen her kittens. Subsequently her mother gives birth to twins, and soon thereafter Marnie’s cat has another litter. More vigilant this time, Marnie sees her father drown the kittens. Her entire world changes. She decides to strike back at God and his agent of destruction — her father — by drowning the newborn twins.
Marnie feels violated. The two beings that were supposed to protect her had instead deceived and betrayed her. This was the first of Dean’s stories to explore this theme and to give the child a fighting chance. It was more than just a story; he knew those feelings of vulnerability. As the story’s creator, he felt the power of striking back against a paternal religion that expected blind obedience, no matter what the cost.
No one from Shippensburg had ever received notice from this contest after years of trying, so Mabel Lindner did not expect any response. When Dean’s story won one of the five fiction prizes, therefore, and when he received additional recognition for the essay, the faculty members were impressed.
His success caused a stir in the English department when two different professors wanted to take credit. “When Dean wrote this story,” says Richard Forsythe, “he did it in one professor’s class. Then he had a creative writing class, and Mabel Lindner recognized it as good, but the other teacher wanted the credit. Dean came to me and said, ‘What am I going to do?’ I don’t remember what I did, but somehow I solved the problem.”
“It was unbelievable,” says Dean. “When this flared up, I was stuck. I had both of them in a class and this battle erupted. I was trapped in the middle. I had a grade coming from one teacher and I had Mabel Lindner — whom I liked — rightly saying she was the one who saw the value in the story.”
While they argued, Dean submitted the story to Readers and Writers, a magazine devoted to short stories, film critique, and art, with no taboos regarding subject or style. This publication’s target audience was made up of students and faculty at colleges around the country. Dean’s letter to them described the story as “an agglomeration of observed fact and imagined fantasy.” They accepted “The Kittens” for their May issue and paid him his first professional money: fifty dollars. For someone who had grown up with so little, this proved a real windfall.
Mabel Lindner acted as advisor to the college literary journal, The Reflector, and the year that Dean won the contest, he joined the editorial staff. He enjoyed working with Lindner, but she had her moments. “There was always about her this air of gentility and grace,” Dean remembers, “but she was also a tough and emotionally demanding woman.”
The Reflector was published each of the three terms that made up the school year. For two issues, Dean was the short story editor, and during his tenure, the paper won high honors from the Columbia University Scholastic Press Association in their annual survey of college newspapers.
In the Winter 1965 — 66 issue, Dean published his prizewinning “The Kittens” (later he dropped “The” from the title), “Of Childhood,” and “This Fence.” Only a year before, a girl named Judy Elliott had published a story in The Reflector called “The Kittens,” which was about a girl who believes a drowned litter of kittens will go to heaven. It was only a page long. Dean was not the short story editor at the time and it is unclear whether he saw this story before he wrote his own; he does not believe that he did. Yet even if that may have happened, it is not unusual for writers to subconsciously process material over which they have briefly glanced and come out with an original twist on a similar theme. The only items on which the two stories converge are the names of the protagonists — Marcy and Marnie — and the fact that they are concerned about what happens to dead kittens. Dean’s story is much longer, far more descriptive, and more menacing. He brings to bear on the subject matter his own anger at a religion exploited for the purpose of deceit and a father who has no concern for the feelings of others.
His other two stories are poetic in tone. His poignant “Of Childhood” is a page-long essay on the idea that pleasant memories outweigh the unpleasantness in a child’s life. The key to this lies in the child’s awareness of the senses. “It is the only time in a man’s life,” he writes, “when he feels and is a part of nature.” This foreshadows his heavy reliance on nature for metaphors in later works. The third story, “This Fence,” is about boys in Florida watching a rocket blast off and dreaming of a powerful future. To them the rocket “was the mind of a young boy made concrete.” Yet a fence keeps them from the wonders of space — they can only dream.
The next issue of The Reflector was a poetry issue that included four poems by Dean. “Sam, the Adventurous, Exciting, Well-Traveled Man,” imitating e.e. cummings, dispenses with capitalization in its portrayal of a man who has nothing but the mundanity of beers and leers in his sorry life. “Something About This City” attempts to portray Paris, while “Hey, Good Christian” attacks religious hypocrisy. The last poem, “It,” shows conscience to be an unrelenting force:
It calls out to you through the thick of your walls,
through the plaster and maple and long, narrow halls.
It screams and it whines till your ears cry in pain
from tortured, high-pitched constant refrain.
It sniffs and it growls at your strong, locked door,
sniffs at the keyhole and hard at the floor.
It wants in, it needs in; there’s much it must do.
You fight it, you hate it; and you’re scared, too.
Not a monster, my friend,
that will do you in —
simply your conscience.
When “The Kittens” appeared in The Reflector, other students stopped Dean in the hall to comment on it. It was the first positive feedback he received for his writing, and he liked it.
Although Dean took summer courses to accelerate his progress, he was still able to work for the latter part of the summer during his sophomore and junior years. He took a job as a park ranger at Shawnee State Park, not far from Bedford.
“I was officially called a forest ranger,” he explains, “but I was no forest ranger. I was a kid wearing a forest ranger outfit, but my duties were clerical. It was a campground and I held down the front desk. If anybody came in for camping, I’d issue them a ticket and take their money. Some weeks I worked days, and some weeks I came in at ten at night and worked until six. Mostly I sat at a desk and read novels. I got terrific pay because I was a state employee.”
It was not all peaceful, however. Once he had to race a kid to the emergency room in Bedford, many miles distant. Another time, he was the victim of a holdup, and for this he got his picture in the paper.
On the last day of July in 1966, around ten-thirty at night, Dean was in the camping office. Two men came to the door, and the one who stepped inside was armed with a revolver. Dean had seen him the day before, trying to get a camping permit. He had curly blond hair, acne scars, and was wearing a black jacket with a map of Korea on the back; the other man was taller and had dark hair. The blond ordered Dean to stay seated as he rifled through the park receipts for the day. He also ordered Dean to give him whatever money he had. The robbers left with over two hundred dollars, including five from Dean. He ran to the door and watched them ride north on a motorcycle. Then he called the state police, who ordered roadblocks, but the culprits escaped. Dean later told a reporter that the gun that was trained on him had “looked like a cannon.”2
Soon thereafter, Dean returned to school for his last semester. Before long, he would be married and working at his first professional job.
1Dean R. Koontz, How to Write Best-selling Fiction, (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 1981), p. 4.
2Bedford Gazette (Bedford, PA, August 2, 1966).