One morning, in 2000, while I was working as an editor for Henry Holt, a manuscript contained on several compact disks was delivered to my office. Back at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it was still relatively unusual for submissions to arrive in any form other than a stack of paper, so the occasion was memorable for that reason alone. More memorable yet was the manuscript’s author, William T. Vollmann, who had been churning out thick, conceptually audacious books faster than New York publishing could keep pace. From 1987 through 1993, for instance, Vollmann published eight books through five different houses.

This new Vollmann manuscript, Rising Up and Rising Down, was sent on compact disk mainly due to its length: 3,800 pages. “Let me get back to you,” I told his agent. I’d heard vague stirrings about Vollmann’s gargantuan undertaking, in the same way I imagine London studio engineers were hearing about Sgt. Pepper’s in the winter of 1967. The book was said to be an attempt to define a philosophically coherent set of moral coordinates for when violence was acceptable. Many houses had already rejected it, which was why its fate had fallen to a 26-year-old greenhorn such as myself. And now here I was, marshaling the entire assistantariot of Henry Holt to help me print the thing out.

A week later, I went to my boss and told him I thought we should do it. He’d read enough to agree, provided we could get Vollmann down to 1,500 manuscript pages, which was, given Vollmann’s chosen font (I had taken to calling it American Miniscule) actually more like 2,000 manuscript pages. I knew enough about Vollmann to guess at his thoughts concerning the general barbarity of editors and believed my best shot was to convince him how much I loved the book and how sincerely I believed it would benefit from compression. One Monday afternoon, he heard me out over the phone. Our conversation ended with him saying, “This subject is too important for truncated treatment.” Only while riding the subway back to Brooklyn that night did it occur to me to laugh. In 2003 McSweeney’s published a handsomely slipcased, seven-volume edition of “rurd” (as it’s known to Vollmann fans), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Two years later, Vollmann finally consented to publish a “truncated” one-volume RURD, through HarperCollins, though he did so, by his own admission, for the money alone. Today, copies of the McSweeney’s edition can go for close to $1,000 on Amazon.

Fourteen years after our phone conversation, Vollmann and I walked down a quiet street in Sacramento, California, on our way to pick up shelving wood from Burnett & Sons, a lumber mill close to Vollmann’s studio. As we moved through sawdust-spiced air, the man I was now calling Bill smiled to remember his and my long-ago talk. I wanted to know: Did I ever have a shot at convincing him to shorten the book? “Nah,” he said.

Although Vollmann these days sports the punctilious mustache of a maître d’, he still resembles the baby-faced boy wonder readers first encountered in his shocking late ’80s author photo, in which he affectlessly held a pistol to his own head. Vollmann is a man of forbidding reputation, to say the least, which is why his speaking voice—as polite, deep, and expressive as someone selling you a vacation over the phone—so surprised me. He takes obvious pleasure in speaking, especially when he can add some mischievous wrinkle to whatever is being discussed: “Well, Tom, you see, the thing with that is this.” You get the feeling he might have been a wonderful grade-school teacher in another, much weirder dimension.