was set in a Chicago hotel during World War II where Dick works as a bellboy (as Willingham had), lusting after a new elevator girl. Its sexual explicitness divided critics, who felt its subject was beneath the writer's gifts, but it sold well and has maintained a cult following among writers. William Styron reported visiting William Faulkner and noticing it prominently placed on his desk, and it appears on various published lists of “lost classics.” The original version was 415 pages long, but a 1964 edition, considerably shorter, is definitive, including a foreword from Willingham who explained how the pressure of End as a Man’s success led him to the grandiose idea of filling the follow-up book with obscure references to the next two in the trilogy. "Success is always dangerous, and early success is deadly," he said in a 1953 interview. "What I went through writing my second book shouldn't happen to a dog." Next came Reach to the Stars (1951), a second Dick Davenport novel, with Dick as a bell-boy in Los Angeles, making observations and sexual hay on the fringe of the upscale Hollywood scene. In 1951, Willingham also published Gates of Hell (1951), his lone book of short stories, mostly comic. The book was revered in literary circles, and in 1970, Tom Wolfe called it "the most undeservedly neglected book since World War II" referring to Willingham as "the great comic genius of American fiction." Natural Child (1952), Willingham's first New York novel, was a portrait of two young men and two young women living the bohemian lifestyle of the time. The sophisticated plotting combined with Willingham's ear for realistic dialogue in one of the lesser-known gems in his collection. To Eat a Peach (1955) chronicled life and lust among adults running a summer camp. Confusion about how to place writing considered both literary and prurient resulted in the release of two different paperback versions, one with the original title and another with racy cover art re-titled The Girl in the Dogwood Cabin. The seeming ease with which it was written bolstered rumors the novel had been written start-to-finish in three weeks, which turned out to be true. Busy with film work, it was eight years before Willingham's next novel, his most ambitious, Eternal Fire (1963), an epic set in Glenville, Georgia, a fictional stand-in for his home town of Rome, Georgia. It chronicles the proposed