Viewing page 4 of 66

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

PROLOGUE

MAEVE
[[SNOOPY CARTOON STRIP]]
[Scene 1]
His was a story that had to be told.[Snoopy sitting on dog house typing on a typewriter]

[Scene 2 - Snoopy is just sitting there]
1965[??] United Feature Syndicate Inc

[Scene 3]
Well, maybe not. [Snoopy sitting on dog house typing on a typewriter]

[Scene 4 - Snoopy still sitting on top of dog house. It looks like he has pulled paper out of the typewriter, crumbled it up, and has thrown it behind him]

SHU

As I was about to start writing this book, five years after I first met Shu, she sent me the above example of Snoopy's fragile literary integrity. While I could appreciate [this is inserted in]] the ineffable wisdom of that delectable dog, I decided that I was not about to be scared off by, as I told Shu, a canine writer who was blocked after he, would you believe, [[/crossed out]] typed that immortal sentence, "'Twas a dark and stormy night." Her's is a story that has to be told, if only because it is such a great story. It is the heroic stuff, as Tom Lehrer sang of Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, of which ballads are made.

For, Florence Schust Knoll Bassett belongs to the exclusive club of those who became a legend in their own time. She is celebrated as the doyenne of the design profession although more than twenty years have passed since she retired to live a private life as the wife of the banker Harry Hood Bassett. Perhaps because, even before her retirement at 48 and the pinnacle of her