Over the course of 60 years, he gave shelter to almost 40,000 people, many of that desperate genre: the aspiring writer. We would often find scraps of paper under the stairwell that revealed themselves to be thank you notes to George from people like Langston Hughes or Graham Greene or Jacqueline Onassis. And so I, and the many thousands of others who passed through, add our not-quite-as-illustrious thank you notes to theirs.