Alexander Key
About Myself

    I’ve always called my Maryland birth a bio-geographical accident, for I’m almost a native Floridian. I say almost, for at this point I can hardly call any state my own. The first Keys settled in Virginia, circa 1670 – the old place in Sussex County is still standing – but about a century-and-a-half ago thirteen members of the family died of yellow fever in thirteen days, so the three remaining members fled over the mountains to Muscle Shoals and were doing very nicely until that rascally Sherman came along, followed by the carpetbaggers. So the tattered Keys fled once more, this time to a log cabin in Florida.
    Anyway, after the Maryland incident, my first six years were spent on the Suwannee River, then one of the wildest regions in the country, where my father had one of the first sawmills and cotton gins in the region – both burned by “night-riders” just before his death. Night-riders were bands of plundering rascals who killed and burned if they didn’t like someone’s politics or economics. (The Suwannee was really wild in those days, and I could write a book about it.) My mother was killed in an accident soon after, and I spent an erratic youth with various relatives, attending no less than fourteen schools until, at seventeen, I took something or other by the horns and with the youthful dream of being a painter headed for Chicago to study at the Chicago Art Institute. I went to the Chicago Art Institute a long time ago when Lorado Taft was teaching there.
    A bank failure put me out on the street at nineteen, trying to make art pay. It did, in the nick of time, but only after I’d grown a mustache and put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses to make me look older, and attired myself in a borrowed suit to give the impression of prosperity. I owed three months rent and was downright hungry the day I sold my first drawing to a publisher.
    I didn't intend to become a writer. I wanted to be a portrait painter, but half through art school the money ran out and I very quickly turned into a book illustrator. I still might be one if a publisher hadn't wanted a book on flying, which I somehow managed to produce. That started it, for I found that with words one can create more fascinating worlds than with paint. As for ideas...
    Thank you so much for your fine letter and your interest in my work. It is always a pleasure to hear from someone who likes what I have written and wants to know more about it.
    Why did I become a writer? How long does it take to finish a book? How do I get my ideas?
    It is only once in nine blue moons that a writer receives a letter like yours from a reader. Now, I do appreciate how you feel about my work, and all the fine things you said, but in all honesty I must admit that my efforts are the result of considerably more sweat than genius. And being an artist my point of view is considerably different from that of most writers. An artist, to make a living, is forced to develop his power of visualization – some thing few writers do.
    Now, you may find this hard to believe, but my ideas just come to me out of the blue. The characters appear first. They come suddenly from nowhere, burdened with problems, and insist that I do something about them. It was that way with Little Jon and the Beans, Tony and Tia, the great dog, Jagger, and Brick and Princess and Charlie Pill and the others. And just as suddenly my typewriter becomes concerned with them. Months later, their problems solved, the final page of their book rolls out of the machine. With luck it's only threw or four months later, but too often it takes longer.
    But to return to you. There is no question in my mind that you will make your mark as a writer. Just keep at it: read, read, read, and write, write, write. That is the formula. And to add a needed dimension think, think, think. Learn to avoid plots, characters and situations that others have used and have become commonplace. Think twice about anything you decide to write, and give it a point of view and a twist that sets it entirely apart from the ordinary. Writing is thinking, and thinking is helped by increasing your power to visualize – close your eyes and imagine yourself a fly crawling around a wall, seeing the room and every detail as the fly sees it.
    In those days I often wished Chicago would slide over into the lake and vanish, but it was sixteen years before I could acquire a battered Ford and means enough to leave it. The Depression had come and I was practically forced into writing as the only means of getting drawing commissions. I wrote and/or illustrated for most of the juvenile magazines, illustrated scores of school books and began writing reams of blood-and-thunder for the pulp magazines. It was a check from Cosmopolitan that finally took me away from Illinois and down to the Gulf Coast.
    There, I was presently the owner of a curious old home and a curious old sloop, and spent some interesting years writing sea stories for the Post and other periodicals. Then the world blew up and I suddenly found myself in the Navy.
    When World War II was over I returned to my old love, the Gulf Coast. But the magic was gone, and fast-growing Florida was finally too much for me. After three novels and some gallons of drawing ink, the Keys took a scouting trip, with the result that the following spring saw them in a remote corner of the Smoky Mountains, building a new studio home. We have been here ever since.
    Though I am a native of Florida, many of my books were written in the North Carolina mountains where I long had a studio. But in 1976 the Keys moved to Alabama to build a new studio on what we are fond of calling our little plantation. Hopefully, its wildness will furnish a background for more books in the future. I live now at Port Richey, Florida, with my wife and young son
    In between books I have been painting for a long time, and my pictures hang in many private collections. In both painting and writing I try to awaken in people a response to the greater world that exists beyond paving.
    Have long been a professional designer and landscape painter. In the past, I have written for American Boy, Open Road, Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Argosy, Elks, American Mercury and others, but now I write only for young people, about one book a year, and take it far more seriously than any of my other work.
    The world we’ve created is a pretty sad one, and our only hope of making it better is through the young. Their minds are still open. Anyway, I long ago reached the point where I feel the young are the only ones worth writing for.

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