Craig Lambert in Harvard Magazine:
In 1968, Stephen Bergman ’66, M.D. ’73, was driving through the desert in Morocco on a dead-straight road. At one point, he noticed the sun going down directly in front of him while the moon was rising behind. “I had never seen anything like that on Earth,” he recalls.
The sunset/moonrise moment seemed an epiphany, “a sign,” he says, that the symmetries and mysteries of the world, which art echoes, were, for him, life at its richest. Somehow it seemed to validate his innate wish to be a writer, although at that time, Bergman’s actual writing “was too precious to show anyone,” he says. Still, “an adventure had shown itself to me. I loved feeling free of all these damn schools I had spent my life in.”
Even so, Bergman scarcely imagined himself becoming one of the world’s most widely read authors. A decade hence, his first novel, The House of God, on his internship at a Boston hospital, appeared under the pen name “Samuel Shem.” Over time it built a vast global readership that continues even today, with more than 2 million copies sold and translations available in all the world’s major languages.
More here.