Edwin O’Connor has a chance encounter with James Michael Curley.

O’Connor, who had never met the former mayor, sees him in a cab outside the Parker House and introduces himself to Curley, who had had threatened to sue him over the fictionalized portrait of him in The Last Hurrah. But in account of the meeting written by O’Connor in the Boston Globe in 1961, Curley tells him that he liked the book, then asks, “‘Do you know what part I enjoyed the most? . . . The part where I die.'”