It can be read online here: http://www.robertsgriffin.com/Fame.pdf
Excerpt from pages 138-143:
...Pierce told Oliver at the lunch meeting that he was finding it hard
getting a response out of people to the message he was trying to get
across. Oliver asked him whether he had ever thought of writing fiction.
Oliver told Pierce that many of the sorts of people who would respond to
his ideas—those toward the bottom or on the margins of society with less
stake in the existing arrangements and less to lose—simply don't read the
kind of non-fiction material he was generating. If they read anything at
all, Oliver said, it is fiction, and particularly light, action-filled
recreational fiction.
“No, I hadn't thought about writing fiction,” Pierce told Oliver. “It
does sound like a good idea, though. But I really wouldn't know where
to start doing something like that—I've never done any of it.” Oliver told
Pierce that when he got back home in Illinois he would mail him a book
that the John Birch Society had published. It was the kind of fiction that
he had in mind for Pierce to think about writing.
A couple of weeks later, Pierce received a photocopy of the book
Oliver had talked about in the mail. It was called The John Franklin
Letters, and had been published back in 1959.28 Pierce told me he didn't
read the book carefully but that he looked through it enough to get an
idea of how he could do something like that. The "something like that"
turned out to be The Turner Diaries, a book that has sold over three
hundred thousand copies without the aid of a commercial publisher and
bookstore distribution and has become arguably the most infamous book
of our time.
Pierce still has the photocopy of the book Oliver gave him, and I
went through it. The John Franklin Letters is made up of
chronologically arranged fictional letters from one John Semmes
Franklin to his ninety-three-year-old uncle. They span a two-year period,
from 1972 to 1974. (Recall that the book was written in 1959 and thus
its events transpire in the future.) Pierce told me that the letters format
on The John Franklin Letters inspired the idea of a fictional diary, which
Pierce decided would be a good format for writing a first novel. With
diary entries, he would just have to look at the world through the eyes of
one person, Earl Turner. He wouldn't have to put himself in the place of
a number of characters or assume the position of an omniscient observer.
No author is listed for The John Franklin Letters. The preface is
written by a fictional Harley Ogdon, who identifies himself as a
professor of American history at the University of Illinois. He informs
us that Franklin's letters to his uncle record the ousting of the "Buros"
(Bureaucrats) by the Rangers, an underground patriotic military force
Franklin helped form. The Rangers, Ogdon writes, represented the
resistance to the excesses of state control of every facet of American life...
[...]
Guided by the example of The John Franklin Letters, Pierce began
writing what came to be called The Turner Diaries as installments for his
tabloid Attack!. The early installments received an enthusiastic response
from readers, so he kept them going. As with The John Franklin
Letters, the basic situation is a revolt against those in control of America
in a future time. Instead of the Rangers, in Pierce's book it is the
Organization.
---
Interesting. So, on a whim I searched Amazon.com to see if by chance there is still a copy of The John Franklin Letters floating around out there and available sixty years after it was written. There was! A single copy for $20 plus $2.99 shipping. I ordered it for the William Luther Pierce Memorial Library. It has been shipped and will arrive at the National Office in a few days.
There was even a 5-star review of The Franklin Letters on Amazon:
Michael R. Wilson
5.0 out of 5 stars
Proof that the old books are sometimes the best
April 9, 2013
Format: Paperback
I think the forward of this book copyrighted in 1959 states things better than I could ever do, excerpt follows:
Ours is a nation enfeebled by political maternalism. Our voters have been conditioned to vote themselves largess out of the public treasury; to rely upon "government" to provide them jobs, security, ease.
But government cannot give of itself; what government gives to one - either an individual or a pressure group - it must take from others. And the public treasury is guarded by only the public conscience.
If the public conscience tolerates taking from some, to give to others, grasping men will exploit the frailty. Our politicians have done so.
Both parties in Washington are distinguished by men who seek to give their constituency what that constituency wants; tax money, which has been taken from someone else's pocket.
A public which makes such demands upon its officials precludes responsible men holding public office. That those in Washington can compromise with Atheistic Communism is not surprising. To oppose it would require vigor and sacrifice on the part of their constituents.
A continuation of this atmosphere can only bring disaster.....
It was as if Hunter was written directly to me. I had to meet the author, and a couple of months later drove up to WV and did meet with him for three days. He sent me on my way with copies of his Cosmotheist pamphlets, Which Way Western Man? and The Best of Attack and National Vanguard. Later that year, after I'd absorbed that material, he invited me to come work with him. He wrote to me that he needed my help "because the Jew and his collaborators still live!" 