(1964) The Man (126 page)

After the funeral, we received hundreds of condolence letters. I thought I knew my father’s friends and acquaintances pretty well, but some of these letters were from people whose names I didn’t recognize. Many of them were readers, but most were from writers and would-be writers with whom my father had corresponded. My father loved writing so much that, no matter how busy he was, he always set aside time to answer anyone who wrote to him asking advice about how to be a writer.

My father respected the people who read his books. Writing in the London Independent, Rod MacLeish said of my father, “He understood his public because he was a member of it. Irving Wallace will probably be remembered as a writer who made a vast amount of money. It should be acknowledged that, in return, he gave his readers their money’s worth. He was an honourable entertainer.”

My father was also an optimist—a realistic optimist, but an optimist nonetheless. He believed in the good part of each person he met and he believed in the ability of the human race to solve its problems. Above all, he loved the honor of being alive. When I think of my father’s legacy, I think of a quotation from the final page of
The Prize
, the last line of which appears on his grave marker:

“All man’s honors are small beside the greatest prize to which he may and must aspire-the finding of his soul, his spirit, his divine strength and worth-the knowledge that he can and must live in freedom and dignity-the final realization that life is not a daily dying, not a pointless end, not ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust, but a soaring and blinding gift snatched from eternity.”

David Wallechinsky

Maussane-les-Alpilles

2 June 1999

An Original Publication of ibooks, inc.

Copyright © 1964 by the Rowena Company, Inc.,

Copyright © 1999 by The Estate of Irving Wallace

Introduction © 1999 by James Earl Jones

Afterword © 1999 by David Wallechinsky

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Original ISBN 0 671-03894-7

eISBN 1 588-24011-8

First ibooks, inc. Printing December 1999

Cover Design by Claude Goodwin

Interior Design by Michael Mendelsohn at MM Design 2000, Inc.

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