Homer Price

Homer Price by Robert McCloskey (1943) This was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, and I've carried around a copy with me ever since, but I hadn't actually read it in so long, it was like a new book to me. It was actually pretty surprising, how strange these six stories are, funny and sophisticated. It's also illustrated by Robert McCloskey, and he's one of the best. I'm not going to take the time to describe each of these stories—they're all quite different—except for one, called “The Doughnuts”—probably the most well-known—a short film was made from it, and you can watch it on youtube. I was surprised to find a piece of paper in the book, with a handwritten short story I wrote, called “The Doughnuts”—I might get around to reading that, sometime—who knows. The story in the book is about a Homer's uncle's lunch counter, where one evening his automatic doughnut machine goes berserk and keeps making doughnuts—like thousands of them. It really appeals to the imagination, and the excellent illustrations don't hurt! As a young man I discovered a diner in my hometown that had a similar doughnut machine—which became one of my personal seven wonders of the world. One more thing—I started writing a novel in the late 1990s, and I've worked on it on and off since—but finally finished it this month. It went through several different titles in its long and involved evolution, and I'm not exactly sure when I finally settled on the title, The Doughnuts, but that's what it is.