One summer in the 1970s, my father, Glenn A. Reed, traveled to a primitive cabin (no electricity, no indoor plumbing, an outhouse) in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, accompanied by his manual Underwood typewriter and his loyal Dalmatian companion, Jodi. In the solitude of this setting, he composed Let No One Enter: A Novel about Fort Bragg in the 1930s.
It soon became known that he had written a novel, with much curiosity surrounding its pending publication. Until autumn 2018, that publication never came. I am unsure as to the reasons that it remained unpublished. Perhaps he was hesitant to submit it to a publisher because there were certain elements in the story that seemed racy or embarrassing. When read today, there is little that could be perceived as such, but those were different times, and my father was a very private person. Also, in those days, for a book to be published, it normally required submitting the manuscript to traditional publishing houses, where it would be accepted or rejected. With rejection being a common result, perhaps fear of rejection held him back. For whatever reasons, he set the manuscript drafts aside, and I did not even read them until after his death.
Near the final years of his life, he indicated that he would like me to try to publish his novel. Later he kind of pulled back on the idea, saying, “Nobody reads this kind of stuff anymore.” However I find his work of fiction, sprung from his early teaching years, to offer an interesting look at the life of a schoolteacher in what was then an isolated town in the northern reaches of California, during the depths of the Great Depression.
Of all my recollections of my father, one of the most vivid was his ability to observe his surroundings and make sense of what was going on around him. I believe, in that regard, this novel serves him well.
—Glenn C. Reed, Los Gatos, California