Dear TIME-Reader:

"THE highest tribute any story can get is close scrutiny and high praise by the experts concerned. Last week the Air Force was going all out for our text and color picture spread (TIME, March 5) on the nation's youngest military service. It sent copies of the magazine to 660 Information Service officers at U.S. bases around the world. At the Air Force Academy Brigadier General Robert M. Stillman, cadet commandant, ordered copies for each of the 265 cadets. TIME'S story will be used in the Airmanship Division of Cadet Studies and may be incorporated into academy textbooks. Said General Stillman: "TIME writers and photographers are to be congratulated for an excellent story ... a detailed and comprehensive study . . ."

IN a corner of the National Affairs bullpen is the most prized copy boy station in our editorial department. It is furnished with a comfortable chair, phone, water cooler, a typewriter and plenty of copy paper. And it is partly closed off by a massive pillar. In the privacy of this corner, a succession of young men have daydreamed, read, studied college textbooks or pecked hopefully at the typewriter between errands for the editor, the writers and the researchers in the N.A. section.

One of these was Thomas Anderson, whose first novel, Your Own Beloved

Sons, is reviewed in this issue (see BOOKS). Tom occupied the corner for a year. By day the copy boy buzzer was a continual interruption, but late at night, when the big bullpen was dark except for the ceiling reflections of nearby Broadway's neons, he sat under a desk lamp, pipe-smoking and writing. Fifteen times Tom rewrote his book. Late in the summer of 1954 he quit TIME and went off to the cranberry boglands of New Jersey's Toms River country to live alone in a shack and polish the final version of his Korean war story.

Tom's immediate predecessor in the corner was Leslie Stevens, who spent much of his two years there writing plays. Stevens left TIME just before his Bullfight scored an off-Broadway hit that paved the way for a Broadway production of his Champagne Complex. Now Stevens has another play, The Lovers, in rehearsal. Good friends, the two former TIME copy boys have been collaborating on an adaptation of Ibsen's The Master Builder, with Stevens doing the writing and Anderson the translating.

Last week Tom Anderson revisited his old corner and presented National Affairs Editor Max Ways with a copy of his novel. Said Tom: "I think you ought to have one of these, Mr. Ways -- I wrote so much of it on your time."

Cordially yours,

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