Ellison claimed to be devastated when part of the original manuscript was destroyed by a fire in 1967. However, Arnold Rampersad advanced the opinion that the loss of the crucial, irrecoverable sections of his manuscript appears to have been something Ellison concocted after the fact to justify his lack of progress. In his 2007 biography of Ellison, Rampersad points out that, following the fire, Ellison wrote to critic Nathan Scott of his relief that he still "fortunately had a full copy" of all his writing. In different interviews, the lost manuscript pages were described as "360 pages, and "500 pages", and "about a summer’s worth of revisions".