A veteran of the 26th Infantry Division (the old Yankee Division), JAMES MCCONKEY is now working for his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. “I am working on a novel and living in a 25-foot trailer, and am not sure which has diminished my personality more. . . . I hope to have a dual teaching-and-writing career, a combination more and more people seem to be attempting these days. The man Houlihan evolved from my interest in Joyce, Frank O’Connor. Yeats, and my own grandparents.”