Warren reports that he "stumbled" into the writing of fiction when he was at Oxford, where he sought to put down on paper some of the "tales" he had once talked about with his friend Paul Rosenfeld. "Fiction was for me," he remembers, "a way of reliving life that I was separate from - 3,000 miles away from." Those oral tales became "Prime Leaf," and this early version of Night Rider reflected the imaginative "reliving," not of narrative lines (whose literal events occurred about the time Warren was born), but of the human circumstances of the action readily available to the amalgamating memory of a young Rhodes Scholar: people whose characteristic principles and behavior were recognizably human because they were first true to the place that nurtured them. If poetry is what Warren calls "a more.....
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