He remembers the job--which took him three weeks and earned him a quick $1,500--with bitterness. "When that
Planet of the Apes thing came along, I said to [my wife], 'I've been wasting the last 20 years.' I finally began to think I couldn't cut it as a writer," he recalled in a
Publishers Weekly interview with Robert Dahlin. Fortunately for Jakes, his fellow writer Don Moffit had a higher opinion of his work.
Moffit had been approached by Lyle Kenyon Engel, a leader of the paperback trade industry, to write a series of historical novels for publication near the time of Bicentennial of the United States in 1976. The books would follow several generations of the fictional Kent family through the first hundred years of the country's history. Moffit was unavailable for the job, but he suggested that Engel review Jakes's early historical fiction, much of which had been published under the pseudonym Jay Scotland. These "solidly researched, well-plotted commercial novels with believable characters," as they were described in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1983, convinced Engel that Jakes was the man to pen the Kent family chronicles.
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