Wheeler Burden did not think of visiting Berggasse 19 until the third day in Vienna, or at least there is no mention of it in the journal he kept with meticulous care from almost the moment of his arrival. The first days he spent adjusting, you might say, to the elation of newness and the spectacle of this city he knew so well in theory but had never actually visited. Then the practicalities settled on him, followed by a deep feeling of displacement. Wheeler was a long way from home with no means of either identification or support. But before the gravity of the situation set in, he was almost able to enjoy himself. Much of the first day, of course, he was busy marveling at his mere presence in such a magnificent and imperial city. It was 1897 Vienna, after all. The first hour, we learn from the journal, he spent clearing the fog from his mind and pulling himself painfully back to full awareness, emerging from the miasma of what seemed like a long uneasy sleep, and from the catastrophic precipitating event he was nowhere near ready to remember.

In the first moments Wheeler could only stare vacantly at the handsome men in dark coats and top hats, finely adorned women in long dresses with tightly corseted waists and well-defined poitrines, military officers in ornate and colorful regalia, workers carrying lunch boxes. Everywhere there were horse-drawn carriages of all sorts, and tall, elegant marble façades of the grand buildings for which Vienna at the end of the century had become renowned.

You do need to know that Wheeler Burden had never been to Vienna per se but had traveled there many times before in his mind. He could speak German as a result of a natural fluency with languages, and he had a general grasp of the manner in which a young man in fin de siècle Vienna was expected to carry himself, both a result of what now seemed like careful training in the hands of his wise old mentor, the Venerable Haze, whom we will encounter momentarily. In fact, after some reflection, you might conclude that, as with so many heroes who are invited on extraordinary journeys, Wheeler’s way had been prepared.

Some time after his mysterious arrival, in pulling together his initial impressions, Wheeler would detail in his journal his first moments on the Ringstrasse, the broad and magnificent boulevard that encircled the city, as awaking from a great sleep, floating between oblivion and consciousness. Anesthesia was an experience he had been through twice—once having his tonsils removed as a child and once in adulthood in 1969, during surgery to repair a spleen ruptured by an angry Hell’s Angel at a well-publicized rock-concert riot. This time he was not lying inertly in a hospital room blinking at sterile walls and unfamiliar nurses, but rather coming to his senses walking along a magnificent, wide boulevard, gaping at finely dressed passersby and massive, grandly detailed buildings.

His first recollections were ones of ambling aimlessly, smiling, gazing absently at these spectacular edifices with awe and elation, as if the mechanism that had delivered him to this fabulous place had carried with it, like anesthesia, the complete dismantling of any worldly concern.

He must have entered, he figured later, somewhere near the Danube Canal and circled half the old city before enough consciousness descended to demand a verification of place and time. Wheeler found himself drawn to a newsstand, where he picked up his first newspaper. It was then that he realized there was no other city it could have been, really. All of the impressions that led to this inevitable conclusion were rooted in the Haze’s vivid descriptions of the time and place, preserved in his famous “Random Notes,” but of course Wheeler was at the moment much more concerned with practical matters than he was with the peculiar coincidence of winding up in exactly the time and place that he had heard described so often.

First, he had to do something about his clothes. He was staring at the Viennese, predictable given his circumstance, but they were staring back, which, again given his circumstance as a stranger in a strange land, was not good. People staring, you might know, was certainly nothing new to my son. With his long hair and Wild Bill Hickok mustache, Wheeler Burden was on People magazine’s ten most recognizable list five years running in the mid 1970s, and, in the words of one of his grammar school teachers, had been “something of a spectacle” all his life. The Viennese focused their suspicious attention on him as he passed, not recognizing him specifically, as strollers in the 1970s would have, but simply wondering what a man in his late forties of his appearance, dressed as he was, was doing on the Ringstrasse. The style of the times and the crisp morning air made being out in shirtsleeves inappropriate, not to mention uncomfortable. This attention was giving him a deep sense of foreboding.

Since strangeness, not notoriety, was drawing the unwanted attention in this situation, one in which anonymity above all was to be wished, at least until he had his bearings, he decided that doing something about appearance was his first priority.

No matter how much a more cautious person—his mother, say—might have advised looking before leaping, he felt he had to act. So, just as he had made his way around the Ring to the area of the opera house, he was drawn into his first action, a fateful one, one that set in motion everything that was to follow and established him indelibly as the central character in this story.

Across from the opera house, near the grand entrance of the Hotel Imperial, Wheeler was stopped by the sight of a small serving man struggling to remove a heavy steamer trunk from a curbside carriage under the unsympathetic supervision of the trunk’s owner, a stern and athletic-looking young man in his early twenties. The young man drew Wheeler’s attention immediately, first because of his offensive manner and only secondarily because he was a fitter, more compact, and younger version of himself, almost exactly Wheeler’s size and build.

Oblivious to Wheeler’s attention, focused singularly on the unloading of his possessions, the young man burst out, “Hurry up, for god’s sake. I haven’t all day, you know.” His accent was clearly American. He thrust some bills at the struggling man and a note onto which he had written some large numbers. “Here. Have it delivered to four thirty-three,” he said with a contempt that made him immediately unlikable. “I’ve an hour’s worth of business at the American consulate,” he said under his breath, intending not to be understood. “That ought to give even you enough time.”

Wheeler was not sure if it was more the man’s abrasiveness or his own desperation that brought on the suddenness and audacity of his next move, one that would solve his immediate problem and—it must be added—create far worse ones. But however it was, he quickly left the scene in front of the Hotel Imperial, found a back entrance to the hotel, and strode confidently up the broad service stairs. An expert at secretive entries and escapes, Wheeler had learned long ago that assertive confidence always masked inappropriate entry.

On the stairwell, he passed a maid in a white and black uniform. Wheeler saluted her and flashed a confident greeting; then as soon as she disappeared around a corner he picked up a bundle of soiled bed linen and carried it up the stairway. He explored until he found his way to the fourth floor stairwell within eyeshot of room 433 and watched through a crack in the heavy door until the little man with the dolly and trunk arrived.

He slipped into the room unnoticed and into the large hall closet while the man fussed with the luggage. Suddenly, as he heard the door click behind the exiting servant, Wheeler was alone in the spacious hotel room with the large upright steamer trunk, and—because the young man seemed to have packed for a good long stay—with a large wardrobe to choose from. Remembering the “hour’s worth of business at the American consulate,” he took his time, laying out clothes on the bed. He chose the shoes, trousers, shirt, vest, and coat that seemed the most conventional from his brief walking tour of the Ringstrasse. As he finished dressing and was choosing a tie, he noticed on a trunk shelf a neat pile of five envelopes, each with the name of a country written on the outside. He chose “Austria” and found inside a stack of paper currency, which he began to pocket, then returned respectfully to its place. Wheeler Burden had been known to bend the rules, but he was not a thief.

Suddenly, a key sounded in the lock, and the door swung open. The young man, seemingly in a hurry, walked in with his head down and was fully into the room before he looked up and saw Wheeler, now well dressed, standing at attention beside the trunk. The young man let out an involuntary grunt of surprise as his steely eyes did a quick appraisal of the situation. The two men stared for what seemed an interminable moment, the younger one’s face reflecting a quick evolution from stunned surprise to unmistakable indignation.

Had Wheeler known then what he wrote in the journal later, he would have seen in the young man’s eyes a familiar, smoldering intensity too deep for either man to recognize. “And what do we have here?” the young man said, collecting himself, his nostrils flaring, absorbing the very essence of the intruder and sensing something primal that defied words and civility. As his words hung in the air unanswered, the two men remained transfixed, both taking in details of the other.

Had the younger man been less taken aback, he might have sprung forward and attacked, but in that instant of surprised paralysis Wheeler seized his advantage. Before the eyes of his startled new adversary, he reached for the Austrian envelope and, deftly snatching it, brushed past him and stepped through the door and out into the hall. The young man paused for an instant, giving the intruder the slight advantage he needed, then, recovering from his momentary paralysis, darted out into the hallway.

As Wheeler reached the service exit, he swung the door shut with a mighty force, then wedged it closed with a wooden stopper. He descended four flights to the back alley, the sound of the haughty young American banging on the door fading as he went.

Quickly, he reached the Ringstrasse and adjusted his stride to match that of the average passerby. He crossed the broad boulevard near the opera house into the dark narrow streets in the heart of the old city, past St. Stephen’s Cathedral, well removed from the scene of his crime. He was now comfortably and appropriately dressed, with Austrian currency in his pocket, all but a shave and a haircut away from looking like a Viennese or at least a turn-of-the-century American tourist. He felt quite pleased with himself. After he was settled, with some at least temporary means of support, he would try to find the man and make amends, but for now he had Vienna to think about.

Wheeler Burden was a new man. He gave little thought to his old twentieth-century clothing, which he had left like so much shed snake’s skin in a pile beside the steamer trunk in the American’s hotel room. He felt such immeasurable relief at being comfortably clothed and in cash, with no one staring, that, for the moment at least, he was able to disregard the fact that he was friendless, still without passport or any means of identifying himself, and that on this, his first day in 1897 Vienna, he had acquired a mortal enemy.

When he instructed the Viennese barber to cut his hair short and shave the Wild Bill Hickok mustache, Wheeler finished the transformation to anonymity that his borrowed clothing had begun. He now looked “shockingly normal,” his long-time friend Joan Quigley would have quipped, had she been able to see him now in Vienna. “Now, you look just like everyone else,” he could hear her saying, disgusted and amused. Joan Quigley, wife of a prominent federal court judge and social power in Pittsburgh, where her husband had grown up before becoming a Harvard football star, had given Wheeler his first sexual experience back in 1959. She had remained his secret and passionate love for fifteen years. “Wheeler Burden is fifty-yard famous,” she had told him one day in San Francisco shortly after his injuries in the Altamont catastrophe, exasperated, referring to him in the third person. They were in Golden Gate Park, outside the de Young Museum, and she was trying for the umpteenth time to have a serious conversation about their future together. “I mean, he’s not first-sighting recognizable like Ringo Starr, say, or Robert Redford, or Mick Jagger, oh no, but definitely in the second tier. After walking fifty yards, in New York or San Francisco or Atlanta, you can bet that someone is going to come up and shake his hand and ask for an autograph or ask about Woodstock or whether Shadow Self will stay together.” This time she was especially peeved. “It gets damned annoying, you know, especially when one is trying to have a serious conversation about the future. And he doesn’t do anything to prevent it. It’s that damned Wild Bill Hickok look,” she continued, knowing Wheeler would never settle for anonymity. “No one would recognize you with a shave and a crew cut.”

But people noticing Wheeler on the street had started a long time before the Wild Bill hair and before Joan Quigley had rolled him in the hay at Harvard in 1959. It had been somehow a natural consequence, Wheeler’s mother, Flora Burden, always figured, of having a famous father and an eccentric, no-nonsense mother. That and the fact, incomprehensible to Flora’s English sensibilities, that at age twelve or so their small Sacramento Valley town discovered that this young man could throw a baseball faster than anyone they had ever seen. So it was that his mother became pretty accustomed to having people point and stare as they walked down the street and then come up and want to talk about his future plans.

Whenever Wheeler thought back on his life and its extraordinary trajectory and looked for causes, he inevitably credited being the son of a famously heroic father or perhaps just being generally blessed by benevolent gods. Whatever it was, he could pretty much pinpoint the moment it all started—his epiphany day, he called it—that day at age ten when he pasted the sparrow hawk with the rock. At least that was when it became clear about the throwing-arm part.

In the fall of 1951, Wheeler Burden—then known as Stan—was ten, a fifth grader, walking with his mother in the bottom forty acres near the Feather River, the part of their farm inside the levees that flooded nearly every winter and was suitable only for row crops. Flora loved the bottomland, with its large open bean fields and thick stands of cottonwoods and isolated pothole lakes where you could scare up wild ducks and pretend you were lost and alone. There was a calm wildness to it that was like nothing she had known growing up in London. In the long tormented days when she first arrived after the war, the walks with her son were her salvation.

This one afternoon, he was giving her, as was the custom on those walks, a detail-rich and seamless version of the latest chapters of Ninety-Three, the Victor Hugo novel he was reading, or rereading. For young Stan Burden, his mother always conjectured, talking was discovery, so she would just let him ramble as she lost herself in figures from the recent prune harvest. She knew he was eccentric, flamboyant even, and she liked that. His free flow of ideas kept her good company, and she figured the outpouring was good for releasing all the pent-up male energy of growing up without a father.

She walked and listened as he recounted all the vivid details of Hugo’s heroine, a mother hauling her children through the ravages of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Wheeler had no idea of the events that she had worked to keep secret: that when he was very young his own mother had made a very similar odyssey hauling her own infant son through newly-liberated northern France after the invasion, searching for her Resistance-hero husband, the boy’s father, the legendary Dilly Burden.

As Wheeler told the Victor Hugo plot, he noticed with ten-year-old fascination a sparrow hawk hovering at about a one-hundred-foot distance. Without thinking, and definitely without breaking stride in his narrative, he picked up a smooth stone and winged it straight at the bird, striking it squarely in the chest. The bird fell like an overripe peach and hit the ground with a thud.

Wheeler’s story stopped midsentence, his jaw dropped, and boy and mother stood watching the fallen bird as first it lay inert on the bottomland’s rich alluvial dust, then struggled to raise itself, shaking the cobwebs out of its tiny brain.

“Look what you have done,” his mother said without a trace of either awe or humor, after it was clear that the bird was not dead and might in fact revive. “And for no reason.”

Wheeler’s mother had a well-earned reputation as a no-nonsense pacifist. Five years earlier, in 1946, her husband already dead in the war, she had made the unlikely move with her five-year-old son from their bombed-out London neighborhood to the small family farm in far-off California. Wheeler’s father’s family, the Boston Burdens, had given it to Wheeler’s mother outright. It was a way to buy her off, to get her out of the way, a recompense for what she had been through, and a place to raise the family’s only grandson, the last of the Burden line. Wheeler’s mother, ravaged by war herself, had been glad to leave the gloom of her own and her country’s loss, and the Boston Burdens had been glad to have her out of sight. The family, at least Wheeler’s grandfather, had never accepted Flora. Regardless of how desperately she had loved his son and how she had left England to search for him almost as soon as the Allies landed in Normandy, it was clear to Flora that to the old patriarch Frank Burden she was little more than that English Jewess his son had gotten pregnant.

What may have appeared to the world and even perhaps to Flora Burden as exile was for a London-born American boy a dream come true, the ideal surroundings for an upbringing. From his earliest years, Wheeler roamed the bottomlands with his friends, carefree and uncomplicated.

Now, watching the wounded bird fluttering on the ground beside his mother, who understood little of what it was to be a ten-year-old rural California boy, Wheeler could only stammer. He thought of explaining to Flora the entire history of boys and rocks and incredible long shots, but for once in his short life he was speechless and even at the age of ten realized the futility of some tasks. “It was far away—” he began, still feeling the magic of the stone leaving his hand. “I never thought I’d even come close.” The sparrow hawk stretched out its wings.

“You were trying to hit it.”

“Well, yes,” Wheeler stammered. How do you ever explain to your English mother how an American boy throws rocks at just about everything, not really expecting to hit anything? And this English mother, Flora Burden, was about the most uncompromising woman Wheeler would meet in his life. She drove a hard bargain in buying goods for the ranch. She knew exactly whom she wanted as friends and whom she did not. She was single, celibate, self-assured, and intended to stay that way. She was considered beautiful, granted, but her commitments ran too deep. “I’m an eagle,” she would say to Wheeler. “When I chose your father I mated for life.” And her commitment to pacifism also ran deep. She had been a life-long disciple of Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and, most important, Sigmund Freud, whose seminal works she had embraced early and whom, at the end of his life, she spent time with when he emigrated from his Vienna home to London in 1938. She certainly did not want to be raising a young warrior, and, perhaps most important in this case, she knew nothing about ten-year-old arms and throwing range except that what began with throwing rocks ended with mighty armies going at each other.

“I didn’t think I’d actually hit anything,” he stammered again, still amazed at what he had accomplished.

“Well, now you know,” she said, her way of pointing out what she hoped would be a life lesson for Wheeler, that such tiny and thoughtless acts of violence were exactly what eventually caused the huge consequences of global war. She never forced him to promise anything. She had complete faith in her son’s rational powers, and saw no reason to explain or ask for an explanation. “Well, now you know” was for her all that was necessary. She had the utmost confidence that he would hear it, absorb it, and make the necessary attitude changes.

The sparrow hawk collected itself one last time, flapped its wings, then rose haltingly and flew to a nearby stand of cottonwood trees. Wheeler watched silently and recalled again the sensation in his right arm as the stone had left his hand. His fingers seemed to follow the trajectory of the stone to the fluttering target in one beautifully unified motion. Wheeler looked down at his hand, opening and closing it. He looked up at the position in the sky where the hawk had been hovering; then he looked back at his hand, then up to the cottonwood where the bird was regrouping. It was hard to explain, but something began to dawn on the boy in that moment. He had felt for just an instant the connectedness of all things.

It was, you would have to say, a life-altering moment. Wheeler’s was going to be no ordinary journey.

Writers Love It:

"Selden Edwards' impressive debut novel is richly-inventive, woven tightly with incident, and fully engaging. It is also superbly humane and readable."
—Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day and The Sportswriter

"Selden Edwards' The Little Book is a wonderful novel and I think it has a chance to become a famous one. I've never read a novel like it. And I felt like my life was changing forever as I savored its many delights and mysteries."
—Pat Conroy, bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and My Losing Season

"The Little Book is named as one of “two first-time novelists I'm looking forward to becoming acquainted with,”
—in a list by Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March and the recent People of the Book in the Wall Street Journal Weekend

Reviewers Love It:

"A major BEA galley to grab... This novel ends up a sweet, wistful elegy to the fantastic promise and failed hopes of the 20^th century."
—Publishers Weekly

"A work that feels effortless... Part mystery, part meditation on the marriage of past and present, part love letter to a bygone era, the novel moves fluidly through time and place, belying its three-decade creation."
—Playboy Magazine

“Not every summer volume is a throwaway beach book, quickly skimmed and quickly forgotten. Herewith, promising, (mostly) substantive reads... Written over 30 years, Selden Edwards's The Little Book (Dutton, August 14) dumps '70s rock star Wheeler Burden in late 19th-century Vienna, where he tangles with Freud, Mahler, and growing anti-Semitism."
—The Boston Phoenix

"If you like time travel, romance, and fin de siecle Vienna, this is your summer book. A San Francisco heir and philosopher suddenly finds himself in 1897 where he meets Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, and his own father."
—From Marjorie Kehe's summer book roundup in the Christian Science Monitor

Booksellers Love It:

"There is a nothing little about this book. It ever so subtly transcends those assigned categories of history, science fiction and contemporary literature. It is a book penned with the insight of present culture, but felt with the passion of times and people."
—Katie Capaldi, McLean & Eakin

"Once in a great while a book comes along that forces its reader to read it slowly, enabling them to savor every elegantly crafted sentence; Selden Edwards' The Little Book is this kind of book. Incorporating time travel, historical fiction, with a life altering love story, Edwards magically weaves a believable tale of one family's multigenerational visit to 1897 Vienna. The Little Book is the one galley our staff is fighting for; I can't wait until August 14th when we can put it in the hands of all our favorite customers!"
—Kathleen Caldwell, A Great Good Place for Books

"The Little Book seems like the work of a mature writer, and indeed it is. Selden Edwards is not a youngster although this is his first work of fiction. Amazingly, he pulls off a time-bending narrative in which grandmother as a college student; father, a young soldier; and son, an accomplished musician meet in Vienna in 1897. Their shared love for fin de siècle Vienna draws them together and strengthens their emotional connections. They meet Sigmund Freud, listen to the Mahler's first performances, and hang out with young philosophers in coffee houses, even as the wars to come are foreshadowed by an evil Vienna politician who has found that anti-Semitism wins votes. The combination of dynamic characters and a magical setting offers wide appeal to reader."
—Carla Cohen, Politics and Prose

"I was intrigued by a book that promised the adventures of Wheeler Burden, a 1970s rock'n'roll icon who finds himself in turn-of-the-century Vienna, that promised scenes with Freud and Mahler, of love and despair. I was intrigued by the premise, but also skeptical that a first novelist, or any novelist, could pull it off. But Selden Edwards pulls if off superbly and proves he's an adept weaver of the large themes and small events that make the tapestry of great literature. In writing about Vienna, you have to get the music right, and Edwards hits all the right notes and times well the crescendo."
—Land Arnold, McIntyre's Fine Books

"The Little Book is the kind of read that stays with you long after you've finished reading it—poignant, touching, intricate in both its construction and plot with characters that seem perfectly real."
—Heidi Sobel, Mysteries to Die For

"The Little Book is simply one of the best books I have ever read. The narrative is so creative and imaginative that even veteran readers will be surprised and delighted. The Little Book is at once a story about the strength of family, the power of the individual, and 19th Century Vienna. This book appealed to me on so many levels. I loved the depth of the characters, the dilemmas of time travel, and the lessons that history teaches us. Because this is ultimately a love story of great proportion, one that spans time and generations, it will have great appeal to a wide spectrum of readers. Finally, this is the first book I have ever read that made me want to read it all over again, right after I read the last word."
—Terry Gilman, Mysterious Galaxy

"And The Little Book—we all love a time-travel story, and this is one of the best: along with the great historical feel and the forbidden romance, (he) has new things to say on the grandfather paradox and "what if you had the chance to kill Hitler...
 
So great...I'm going to handsell the hell out of this. I can't wait."
—Jack Rems, Dark Carnival

"Well written...The plot is enjoyable and moves smoothly along. The timelessness of varied timelines and the historical setting is an interesting contrast to what could be seen as commentary on the current state of our own nation and its coffee house patrons."
—Terri Dreier, Nebraska Books

"Even if you are not a fan of time travel, you will enjoy The Little Book by Selden Edwards. This is a love story that transcends time and generations to 1897 Vienna. Would you change the course of history?"
—Beth Carpenter, The Country Bookshop

"An absolutely wonderful book. It has layers of meaning and an interconnectedness that make it a breath-taking read. It's a history lesion and a love story, a mystery and a psychology lesson. I can't recommend it highly enough."
—Carey Anderson, Tavern Village Books

"The Little Book is a novel about a man who travels from the present back in time to fin de siecle Vienna. This debut novel by Selden Edwards tells a great story that includes Sigmund Freud as one of the characters and also a war hero father who died before he had a chance to know the son who suddenly appears and is reunited with him in very mysterious circumstances. It sounds bizarre, and it is, but it is very creative and a perfect summer novel."
—Gayle Shanks, Changing Hands Bookstore

"I am 1/2 way through The Little Book and am thrilled with it!... I've got other people lined up for it! If you haven't read, please do!"
—Jane Jacobs, Porter Square Books

"The Little Book packs a big Wallop! This is a remarkable story by a new voice in fiction. I read right through this book—very hard to put down. I'd like to see more from this author."
—Cheryl Kravetz, Classic Bookshop

"In this remarkable new novel, the main character, Wheeler Bruden finds himself transported to 1897 Vienna, where he meets not just Sigmund Freud but his own father. How history and Bruden's family blends together and unfolds is truly breathtaking. The author spent over thirty years writing this novel and it certainly shows!
—Catherine Wallberg, Harry Schwartz Bookstore

My construction of this story began in 1974, the year I studied at Stanford, and a friend introduced me to a book called Witgenstein’s Vienna. He and I began theorizing about immersing ourselves there and then, and I began thinking up a thriller/mystery-type story about traveling in time to turn-of-the-century, fin de siecle Vienna and meeting the child Hitler: would you kill him? I began collecting and reading articles and books about the period and began expanding my imaginings way beyond that simple plot line of the first draft. Eventually, I developed a library of over fifty books and expanded the plot well beyond the simple idea of meeting the obligatory love interest and the child Hitler. Wheeler Burden came to life and grew in detail over the years, especially thanks to an eccentric college friend Doug Messenger who had wonderful stories about his baseball and music and to David Crosby who became a friend in the 1980s. The other characters grew out of the needs of the story over the years, and once introduced they developed lives of their own, as a novel’s characters tend to do. I had a full-time job, first as an English teacher and then as a private-school headmaster, so I did my writing sometimes on weekends but mostly on my vacations. But the story was nearly always in my head, gaining characters, details, layers and plot twists.

I must admit that during much of this novel’s long history I felt many times that it would never see the light of day. When I would work on a revision and then mail it out, I would have bursts of confidence, but the rejections usually left me feeling pretty disappointed. But my love of the story and an unwillingness to give up on all the work I had done kept me going. When New York agent Scott Miller suddenly accepted it in February 2007, I will admit to being pretty stunned and surprised. When it was purchased by Dutton a few weeks later I was even more stunned and surprised, not to mention elated beyond words.

During the novel’s long 30-year gestation period, it was titled Fin De Siecle, and no one read it, except perhaps the agents and publishers who rejected it over the years. After it was very suddenly purchased, my wife and three children read it in manuscript form and were very helpful in the final editing process. Needless to say, they are ecstatic about its sudden success and have been very enthusiastic promoters. It has been great fun and very touching sharing the story with them.

Beginning in 1974, I became fascinated with the period and place, the late 1890s and Vienna, and began collecting books and reading. I was introduced to Carl Schorske’s work almost immediately. I also found other works of significance. In my first year of study, a used book dealer found me a Baedeker’s guide to Austria for the period. I greatly enjoyed reading books and absorbing other media, especially video and movies, about fin de siecle history and culture, but also about the other time periods and issues in the story. At one point, for instance, I began reading about and collecting material about espionage during World War II. I also did research on the physics of baseball, music in the 70s, and gothic cathedrals among other topics. I found the research an enjoyable way to pass the time as I was waiting for my novel to be discovered.

One of other reasons I kept working on the story, in spite of its many rejections, was that I loved placing myself in the story and imagining what it would be like to meet certain historical figures. Although I was cautious not to add so many known characters as to make the story totally unrealistic, I found that certain characters were unavoidable: Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud, Buddy Holly and the child Hitler were those unavoidables. I found Wheeler’s conversations with Freud totally compelling, and in the near-final draft they were probably about twice as long and dense as they emerged after the very skilled work of my editor Ben Sevier.

In some ways The Little Book defies categorization, with is at once both its strength and weakness. I think that one of the reasons it avoided acceptance for so long was that agents and publishers thought it too unconventional. I must admit that now I feel uncomfortable when people say, when hearing the plot summary, “Oh, it’s science fiction,” or “It soulds like a historical novel.” Often readers reject a new book because it is from a genre they don’t much like. Very often, when people want to categorize it, I say, “You’ll just have to read it.” Even now, I can’t bring myself to come up with a descriptive adjective. I’d just rather think of it as a “compelling read” and leave it at that.

With the exception of Wheeler Burden, none of the characters in The Little Book is derived from any single person. I have had the luxury of being surrounded by strong forceful women all my life—mother, sister, wife, daughters. In my forty-year career in education, I have worked side-by-side with some indelible women models. And I can think of dozens of women in literature and movies who have enthralled me, my favorite perhaps being Dorothy Gale in the movie The Wizard Of Oz. For a male writer to be credited with creating great believable female characters is, to my mind, a great compliment. If I have been perceived as able to do that, I am deeply touched.

I began my academic life as an English teacher, and there is no doubt that my reading and teaching of certain classics have greatly affected my writing and sense of story. In the past ten years or so my graduate study in mythology and Jungian psychology also come through in my writing. The Little Book is definitely a “Freudian” novel, reflecting my interest in the early days of psychology and psychotherapy. Wheeler Burden becomes fascinated by mythology in his early years and then by the link between mythology and psychology in later life. That fascination becomes apparent in his passionate conversations with Sigmund Freud.

From its very inception in 1974, I was writing a story about a character who wakes up one morning in 1897 Vienna, inspired by Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” the story of how the main character Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as a bug. There is no explanation given; he just wakes up as a bug. Mine is not a science fiction story. It is just the story of someone who finds himself arrived in a strange land, with no means of identification or support, and has to make a go of it.

Wheeler Burden came to life and grew in detail over the years, especially thanks to an eccentric college friend Doug Messenger who had wonderful stories about his baseball and music and to rock icon David Crosby who became a friend in the 1980s. Wheeler’s early years are based roughly on my own boyhood on a California farm and my travel east to boarding school.

Because I was an English teacher by trade, I read, reread, and taught many influential novels. In a way, all of them entered my viscera and became part of my “style.” The Great Gatsby and Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn stand out at the top of my list. I think one can see much of those two novels in mine. I absolutely love J.D. Salinger’s stories and Catcher In The Rye is one of my all-time favorites. As I was writing this novel, EL Doctorow, John Irving, Richard Ford, and Pat Conroy played big roles. When I first read Ragtime I feared that people would suspect borrowing, I found mine and it so similar. I also read and was influenced by Time And Again by Frank Finney. There is a zaniness to Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut that I hoped to capture in parts of my portrayal of Wheeler Burden. Conroy’s The Prince Of Tides is in my mind the pinnacle of the mountain I am trying to scale.