Lafferty wrote the unpublished “Pomponia” in 1958, when he was trying to break into different markets, and, like some of the stories he wrote for that purpose, it is both unmistakably Lafferty and somewhat askew from the Lafferty we know. One of the handful of places to which he sent the draft before giving up on it was Seventeen  magazine. It reads like the kind of piece he imagined Seventeen  might like. It takes the form of an exchange between a flighty girl and a mid-cent

“The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.” — Niccolò Machiavelli Castlereagh served on many committees and national forums. His heading-up of any body guaranteed its integrity and success. No president felt properly inaugurated unless Castlereagh stood by his side. His was the most sought-after endorsement in the country. He was Respectability. “The Man With Aura” was first written in 1961, went through several iterations,

Maybe Jones is on my mind, so a short note on something fun. Early on, when Lafferty was considering how he would use the Watkin material that would eventually find its home in the Men Who Knew Everything  sequence, he seems to have considered using Watkin as the basis for a Maybe Jones novel. There is a note that reads, “The Color-Chapter Sequence from Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds ,” followed by some additional sketching and then a portrait of Jones. Jones was somehow goin