The Human Predicament is conceived as a long historical novel of my own times culminating in the Second World War. The fictitious characters in the foreground are wholly fictitious. The historical characters and events are as accurately historical as I can make them: I may have made mistakes but in no case have I deliberately falsified the record once I could worry it out.
The reader may wonder why a novel designed as a continuous whole rather than as trilogy or quartet should appear volume by volume: the plain truth is I am such a slow writer that I have been urged not to wait.
—R.H.