Among my earliest attempts at fiction was “The Misfit,” a short story about a brilliant, competitive, though anti-social and paranoid college student.
The writing was amateurish, but the story was centered around a gimmicky surprise that enabled me to sell it to Aim magazine in 1978: After a climactic confrontation at the end, the principal character is identified as the young Richard M. Nixon.
In real life, Nixon was the only U.S. president to resign, following the Watergate scandal. And Americans my age remember the outrage triggered when President Gerald Ford granted him a pardon in 1974.
