The Paris Review has a pretty sweet blog, and the other day they posted something that should make every literary geek’s heat palpitate with joy. The set-up:

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?

The awesome thing that happened? A bunch of the authors actually responded. And this kid was not screwing around; he contacted some of the biggest names in literature: Kerouac, Bradbury, Rand, Mailer, and Updike, to name a few. The responses of the authors and some context from Bruce make this a most charming read.