Seeking dead professors

That encouraged me to start writing – the Newbery Honor did. And, you know, I managed to make a good living at it. But for years, my poor father worried about me because I never had a steady paycheck. And so what he used to do was he would go through the newspapers, looking through the obituaries for dead English professors, so I could apply to those schools for jobs. And he actually subscribed to about four or five newspapers, trying to find jobs for me.