"The original draft of the first parts of a novel about the imaginary state of Jefferson was composed about 1950 while I was working in the old room in Bucks County. It deals with roughly the same terrain as Centennial, and many of the emotional contents are similar. The drylands murder and the effect of the drought on major characters was the same then as now. I cannot say why I dropped the idea; I have always played around with multiple ideas and gone fairly far into plots before concluding that they were not as promising as I had thought originally. This could have been a splendid portrait of a young woman in the west and I have never forgotten the ideas I associated with the theme. They were to come to fruition later...a quarter of a century later."