Supported by his parents, he could concentrate on things that mattered: his writing, his wife-to-be, and his friends and enemies--including the warped Kakapick, who serves Rimrose lastingly as model and prototype of the literary scoundrel. Rimrose-Tale Maker of the title-turns from journalism to fiction-writing, kept alive by his wife's practical and ingenious devotion to selling his stories, even those he has tossed in the trash. As he grows older and begets children, he worries about income and faces stultifying choices: managing his father's small-town newspaper or playing politics in university service. Mark Harris is a professor of English at Arizona State University. His celebrated baseball novels have also been reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press.