Jerome Klinkowitz lectures at San Diego State University as part of the Living Authors Series. He begins with a discussion of a discursive shift after World War II in which realistic fiction no longer represented an increasingly unrealistic world. To make a point about the new use of story-telling in the current era, Klinkowitz has his son read from the Sesame Street book The Monster at the End of This Book. Klinkowitz discusses and gives a reading from Clarence Major’s then forthcoming book Emergency Exit and from Michael Stephens’ incomplete and never published Five James Stephens. Portions of Klinkowitz’s lecture would appear in edited form as Notes on a Novel-In-Progress: Clarence Major’s Emergency Exit, Black American Literature Forum, Vol 13. No. 2, Summer 1979, p 46-50.