In writing “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” he confronted his feelings about his divorce, stressed the value of simple human kindness in his treatment of others, and thereby dissolved his writer's block. The divorce initiated a 13-year writer's block in which Smith was unable to put any fiction on paper with his own hands (though he could dictate it to secretaries or record it for later transcription). In addition, the story's architecture and its principal actions mythologize such autobiographical components as Smith's childhood experiences in Baden-Baden, Germany his intense adolescent romance in Peking and the failure of his first marriage, as related both to his suspicions about his wife's interest in another man and her objections to his cross-dressing. Other story elements draw upon such literary sources as the eighteenth-century French romance Paul et Virginie, Goethe's Faust, and Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo. The title is identified here as a first statement of one of the story's main themes, referring to both religious and astrophysical accounts of how the universe began. Though it has come to be regarded as a classic, the story's title, the behavior and fate of its central characters, and its underlying autobiographical sources have all retained an air of mystery. Cordwainer Smith's novelette “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” is a central component of his future history, marking the onset of the period he called the Rediscovery of Man.
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