What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

After the publication of Old Men At Midnight he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He returned to Philadelphia in 1977. [page needed] Brought up to believe that the Jewish people were central to history and God's plans he experienced a region where there were almost no Jews and no anti-Semitism yet whose religious believers prayed with the same fervor that he saw in Orthodox synagogues at home.

Potok is most famous for his first book The Chosen a 1967 novel which was listed on The New York Times’ best seller list for 39 weeks and sold more than 3400000 copies.