Mazer came from a family of hard-working Polish-Jewish immigrants. Both parents worked in factories, and a young boy's dream of becoming a writer was not given much credence. "Reading was my great pleasure. I was very interested in every library I ever entered, and I remember it was like a rite of passage for me to go from the juvenile section to the adult section of a library."¹

But Mazer did make many serious attempts at writing. "... A lot of sporadic attempts. I was never very successful. (I had, I don't know precisely where they came from, standards well beyond any reading I had done.) I know we had some books in the house; I think we got them through a newspaper promotion: the complete set of Dickens and a complete set of Mark Twain, a set of Jack London. One book used to come every month or...