What Hunter is justly celebrated for, among his other virtues, is his authorial voice, his truest creation, as powerful and unique a voice as exists in American letters. But this instrument, as his editors knew, existed only on paper. Those poor souls who booked him for public speaking gigs found that out soon enough. But Hunter’s authorial voice was perhaps at its purest and most potent in the memos and marked-up manuscript pages that came through the wires late at night and were waiting for us in neat little piles in the fax machine[...] Asked for a touch more detail in this sentence from the Elko piece “For many hours I tossed and turned . . . ,” he came back with “like a crack baby in a cold hallway.”