This afternoon I reached another milestone on the long and winding road to the publication of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Barbara Wood, my copyeditor, sent me an e-mail containing eight “final questions” arising from my responses to her detailed editing queries. All were reassuringly trivial, a simple matter of changing a word here and there. I replied five minutes later, and that was that. I’ll read the page proofs in a month or so and will doubtless make a few last-minute changes at that point, but otherwise I’m through with Pops. As of today, what I’ve written is what will be published on December 2.
If you should find a hitherto-unknown Armstrong letter in your attic next week in which he confesses to having held up a bank in 1921…burn it. I don’t want to know.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
