The Sterile Cuckoo

John Treadwell Nichols moved to Taos in 1969, he felt "strung out, on edge, going down fast, and scared stiff." Outraged by the Vietnam War, depressed by New York City, uncertain about his own career as a writer (he was, at twenty-nine, the author of two acclaimed novels, The Sterile Cuckoo and The Wizard of Loneliness ), he was returning to a spiritual homeland, where he had spent one memorable summer as a teenager, and where he hoped to create a new life for himself and his family.