“At the age of seventeen, working as a delivery boy at Afremow’s drugstore in Chicago was the perfect job, because it made it possible for me to steal enough sleeping pills to commit suicide.” Sidney Sheldon That’s the opening sentence of the autobiography of a man who became a best-selling popular fiction writer apart from making a name for himself in Hollywood, Sidney Sheldon. Born in 1917, Sheldon had to live his adolescence through the Great Depression. His mother, Natalie, was born in Russia, a country which drove her family out along with many others during a pogrom against Jews. She was a dreamer, according to Sheldon. She dreamt of marrying a prince. But the husband she got was Otto, “a street fighter who had dropped out of school after the sixth grade.” Poverty at home. Great Depression in the country. Nothing to cling on to, nothing to look forward to. The young Sheldon managed to grab enough sleeping pills from his workplace, enough to kill him. H
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