JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

Stará Ľubovňa In 1955, John left the army and started wandering through the Middle East. He was badly in need of money, and so he also started sending articles to his agent in the US, Alex Jackinson, to sell to men’s adventure magazines. He carefully kept all of his submissions, with notes on sales and rejections. His first attempt, “Creeping Death of the Nile,” was abandoned, but he had better luck with the second, “End of the Hunt,” which sold to Sport Life. Here, then, is the first installment  of John’s first sale to the men’s magazine market. He was not, by the way, “somewhere in Africa,” and certainly not in Tanganyika, but typing away in a hotel in Cairo.

John writes a letter home, a few months after he’d left and hitchhiked to Greenwich Village to seek fame and fortune as a writer. He was 18 at the time. He notes Truman’s surprising election, and mentions work on a script and a novel. The script was for WJZ-TV, which had started broadcasting only a few months before. The novel was West of Washington Square, which he later told me was thrown out by his landlord. (He mentions it in this bio from that year.) And, like any teenager, he’s been quarreling with his girlfriend.