He was born in one of its North Shore suburbs; he was raised, reached adulthood, and became a paterfamilias as a “typical suburbanite.”

We were caught up in the American Dream. You’ve gotta have a house. You’ve gotta have a country club. You’ve gotta have two cars. Here you are at ten grand and getting nowhere. So I doubled my salary. I also doubled my grief. I now made twenty thousand dollars, had an expense account, a Country Squire—air-conditioned station wagon given by the company—a wonderful boss. We began to accumulate. We got a house in the suburbs and we got a country club membership and we got two cars and we got higher taxes. We got nervous and we started drinking more and smoking more. Finally, one day we sat down. We have everything and we are poor.

I took pride in what I did. I made myself do it right. But it became increasingly ridiculous to spend all that time and energy making sure a print got to the station on Thursday the twenty-second at six ’. I dropped the film off myself on the way home because you couldn’t be sure a messenger would get it there on time. What difference did it make if the film was there on Monday or Thursday? I felt, to live miserably under such pressure, to knock yourself out—it should be for something more important. Life was too short for this.