*This assignment was more touching than I thought it would be. Especially the documents from Clarke's teenage youth, which he'd somehow kept for decades, through every travail. My goodness, but people were poor in those days. I hate to think of the hundreds of thousands of daydreaming, bright young men who never got a break; a science textbook was a donnish luxury, and a small-town lad had to stick with the beer and potatoes.
*A super-disciplined guy when it came to ink on paper, Arthur Clarke. Tremendous work-ethic. A very meticulous typist, and he could spell like nobody's business.
(…)
"One of the oldest and most numinous items is a battered high-school notebook. Its pages feature neat, hand-lined grids in which an adolescent Clarke lists his precious science fiction possessions. He rates the works, too—“good,” “very good” and the rare “very very good.” Young Arthur is particularly keen on H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, as indeed I was at his age—except that I had the benefit of reading heaps of Arthur C. Clarke…"
