In February 1941 his first book Your Faith is Your Fortune came out during a twelve-inch New York snowstorm that cut his usual audience to about 150; that night he slept in the assumption that he was in his mother's home in Barbados, and the following August, after a cable saying his mother was terminally ill, he and his wife sailed on the old Argentina and he slept in that very room - his mother died two weeks after they returned home three weeks later.