For fifty years Theodore Guston was a writer of young adult fiction in which he had imagined himself the hero of his stories. Whenever he reread them, he could still run through Amazon jungles, battle giant pandas on the planet Zorn and rescue a beautiful heiress on the Piazza San Marco in Venice. When he was not living in one of his books, the very act of walking was a tremendous burden. As he stopped in the middle of the street to take a breath, he longed for a life that was somewhere between fact and fiction.