"I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off"
About this Quote
The line lands with a novelist's knack for accidental comedy: a humblebrag, a confession, and a shiver of hindsight folded into one breath. Jerry B. Jenkins frames the origin story of Left Behind not as a master plan but as a scheduling mishap interrupted by proximity to American evangelical royalty. The Billy Graham detail isn’t just credentialing; it’s cultural placement. It situates the series inside a media ecosystem where religious authority, publishing, and celebrity blur, and where being "invited to assist" functions as a stamp of legitimacy for a project that would later be sold as spiritual urgency.
The sentence pivots on "had we known", a small phrase that smuggles in the real subtext: surprise at scale. Jenkins isn’t claiming prophetic foresight; he’s claiming the opposite, which is more disarming. The success of Left Behind becomes an uncontrollable force - something that happened to them as much as something they engineered. That posture also protects the work from purely commercial readings. If the authors didn’t anticipate the phenomenon, it can’t be dismissed as cynical market-tracking; it reads like providence, or at least like destiny in hindsight.
The offhand "we might not have put it off" carries a wink and a warning. It acknowledges how close cultural megahits are to not existing at all, while flattering the eventual audience: you’re holding something that almost didn’t happen. In a genre built on end-times inevitability, the origin story is deliciously contingent.
The sentence pivots on "had we known", a small phrase that smuggles in the real subtext: surprise at scale. Jenkins isn’t claiming prophetic foresight; he’s claiming the opposite, which is more disarming. The success of Left Behind becomes an uncontrollable force - something that happened to them as much as something they engineered. That posture also protects the work from purely commercial readings. If the authors didn’t anticipate the phenomenon, it can’t be dismissed as cynical market-tracking; it reads like providence, or at least like destiny in hindsight.
The offhand "we might not have put it off" carries a wink and a warning. It acknowledges how close cultural megahits are to not existing at all, while flattering the eventual audience: you’re holding something that almost didn’t happen. In a genre built on end-times inevitability, the origin story is deliciously contingent.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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