Peter Schwed

And here we reach the next big moment in the story, outlined in my previous Blackboard Jungle episode.

Hunter expanded his short novel Malice in Wonderland to a full-length story, known as Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and sent it speculatively to Peter Schwed, an editor at the publisher Simon & Schuster.

Simon & Schuster were by that time a well-established publisher who had helped pioneer the notion of returns for unsold books and for starting the paperback boom in America with their financial backing of pocketbooks, the country's first dedicated mass-market paperback publisher.

They were also very responsive to trends, tending to commission work to meet the market rather than simply solicit manuscripts from anybody.