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The story of Kings Row was originally planned as a trilogy, depicting the life of a small town from the turn of the century through to the present time. The first volume was published in 1940 and was to have been followed in 1945 by the second volume, Parris Mitchell of Kings Row. However, my husband’s failing health made it impossible for us to complete the work, and the task long planned has fallen to me alone.

After his death, Simon and Schuster, knowing how closely my husband and I had collaborated, suggested that I complete the story, following the outline which had been submitted and approved. I undertook the exacting task fully conscious of the magnitude of effort required to sustain the writing at the level of the first volume. But by following conscientiously the outline on which my husband and I had worked, and with the use of copious notes which we made together during the years that elapsed between the publication of the first volume and the death of my husband, I am able to offer this story of Parris Mitchell. There has been no effort to copy my husband’s style as evidenced in Kings Row. There has been only a sincere effort to tell the story as I knew it from the many hours of our discussion of the proposed incidents and our development of the characters involved.

Recognizing the fate that so often befalls “sequels,” I hasten to say that this is not a sequel, but a continuation of the story of the town, introducing many new characters and situations.

Henry Bellamann’s method of work was an unusual one. We talked stories out in minutest detail, and he rarely wrote a line unless I was in the room with him. He never, at any time, wrote a scene that had not been clearly rehearsed, and after it was written, he never revised a passage. Any revision or cutting or editing fell to my lot. For that reason the characters created were my constant companions as well as his. They did not always act as we expected. They often went their own way—sometimes to our dismay. But by the time a story was written, we both knew the characters intimately.

I have often wondered how it was possible for two writers of totally different background and training to collaborate successfully on a story, yet it has been done often. However, I wish to explain that my husband and I were married young and most of our training was obtained together. For nearly forty years we read the same books, studied the same music, saw the same pictures, knew the same people, and had the same hobbies. During all that time we were seldom separated for a week at a time. When he taught piano, I taught singing in a studio not more than twenty feet away from his own. When he worked on the translation of the Brahms song texts for a French publisher, I sat across the table and wrote a novel, My Husband’s Friends. When he reviewed books for a literary page, which he did for many years, I looked over each week’s accumulation of volumes, eliminated those of less importance, and read with him those he needed to review. It is not strange that our tastes and ideas should have followed parallel lines.

The present volume departs somewhat from the original purpose; it was to have been the psychoanalysis of the town as viewed and understood by Dr. Mitchell. It so happens that it has turned out to be more of a personal history of the young doctor and his frequently frustrated efforts to help the unwilling people about him.

The reader will recognize many characters carried over from Kings Row: Parris, Randy, Miles Jackson, Fulmer Green, Jamie Wakefield, Mrs. Skeffington, and others. Paul Nolan, Laurel, and David Kettring were taken from Floods of Spring. I have tried to develop these characters logically and naturally.

Wherever possible, I have incorporated actual pages from suggestions made by my husband during his illness. Any diversity of style must be attributed to the fact that I wished to preserve every particle of any actual writing that he had done. A good memory has enabled me to record more accurately than one would suppose the precise phraseology of his comments. To mention some of the work that is set down precisely as he dictated, I call attention to the Davis Pomeroy compulsion—the scene at the hilltop in the moonlight—the death of Pick Foley and the near tragedy of Drew Roddy. The Punch Rayne story had been fully planned and partly written.

On the whole, I have followed as closely as was logically possible our plan for the book on which we worked together before and during his illness.

Katherine Bellamann

August 22, 1947

Jackson, Mississippi