The fiction writer with the largest audience in America? You'd probably think of a best-selling novelist--say, Harold Robbins or Irving Wallace. Wrong.

Most of us spend more time watching televisiom than reading books, and the man who singlehandedly creates more programming than anyone is a quiet-spoken, gray-haired New Yorker named Henry Slesar.

As headwriter for The Edge of Night (CBS and Somerset (NBC), this former president of his own advertising agency, now only in his early forties, originates 10 new half-hour shows a week...every week--520 episodes annually! His only surcrease is a very occasional Presidential address, Apollo moonflight, or New Year's Day football game. Last season's Nielsen for Slesar's two serials combined was 16.5. That would add up to an audience of roughly 12 million a week. No other fiction writer can come close to that.

Indeed only one other soap dispenser has a following even remotely approaching Slesar's. She's Agnes Nixon, original creator and writer of ABC's All My Children and One Life To Live . Their combined Nielsen last season was a lower 12.8.

"Thinking when he's sitting, standing, or sleeping" is how John Potter, Procter & Gamble's representative for Somerset describes Slesar. Others call him merely fantastic and a phenomenon and unique. The job expectancy of an author on a soap is about a year. Grinding out dramas, all of which are supposed to be compelling day after day, burns a man out. Slesar has completed more than three years with Edge plus a year now with Somerset . True, he no longer has time for novels (he has written four), does fewer short stories (700-odd published), but he regularly contributes to Playboy, writes screenplays (Murders in the Rue Morgue) and also does story development for MacMillan and Wife, the new Rock Hudson series.

His routine has to be Spartan. Seven days a week he's up at 8, steps into his paneled, book-lined study, turns on his $10, 000 computer operated hi-fi, sits down at his electric typewriter, and starts writing at white heat. "When breakfast is ready," he relates, "I eat it, go back to work, have lunch, go back to work, watch the shows from 3:30 to 4:30, then back to work, quit around 6. If I'm a little behind, I work at night. On Sunday, I work a little shorter day."

A widower newly remarried to a piano-playing, willowy blonde, he dreams of vacations. The only way he can get one, though, is to double the already incredible pressure and write for weeks into the wee hours so that on his departure, the shows will be well-stocked with stories. Only trouble is, when he returns, he's right back where he started from.

"You can never rest. Writing nighttime, you finish a teleplay, lean back, slap the pencil down and say, pretty good, all wrapped up, finished. But not on a soap. You come to the end of an important scene. You want to look it over, enjoy it. But uhh-oh, what happens after that?"

Actually, he's better equipped to answer that question than most daytime writers. About once a year he prepares a 20-or-so-page story projection which amounts to to a synopsized, self-contained mystery novel. Then every week, a fraction of this is expanded into an outline for performance. Called a breakdown, this is actually a scene-by-scene (seven daily on Edge, five on Somerset) narration of every major bit of action Monday through Friday.

The fleshing out of these breakdowns, creating the dialogue itself, is done a little more than half by Slesar and the rest by two writers who subcontract for him and struggle to imitate his taut, flat, disarmingly dramatic style. Their work though never wholly pleases him, so five or six precious hours weekly are spent editing and often extensively redoing them.
 
 

Slesar, unlike most people in tv, has few working contracts with others. The one interpersonal ritual in which he does participate, where he can be more dazzling than any of his actors, is the story conference. "Once in six weeks," he sighs, "you're on the griddle." At these all day sessions, during which sponsors and and ad agency executives evaluate and pick apart a writer's ideas or a show's future, dramatists who have major movie credits often grow defensive, hostile, even violent. Slesar never. "You have to improvise," he explains. "With the stories so complex, going on forever and ever, they ask things you could not possibly have thought of in advance. He improvises so well that Freddie Bartholomew, former child star and now Benton & Bowles supervisor for Edge , marvels at the way Henry comes to conferences with the whole thing worked out in his head.

His own ideas though are just a starting point. His receptive, synthesizing mind snatches from anywhere. At a story conference he'll take a suggestion, give it a fresh twist, and says John Potter make it twice as good. A nuance observed in an actor's performance will lead him to develop a whole new plotline which uses that player's hint of strength or weakness.

Every soap juggles 20-or-so major characters in parallel interlapping stories. Slesar uniquely manages to interweave all these people so that they give the appearance of living normal lives. Yet their relationships with each other, their myriad tensions, their delights, gropings, furies, all hinge on jeopardy, from one unknown source, usually a murderer moving among them, a device which unites half a dozen stories into one story and an exciting one, too.

P.G. Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, 70-odd novels, and scores of essays, plays, and films, and Slesar's most celebrated fan, quite agrees. Wodehouse, who never misses Edge , describes Henry quite simply as "a chap who has a good story to tell and knows how to tell it."

Coming to Edge as he did from having written 50 Alfred Hitchcock Presents, chunks of Run For Your Life , Man From Uncle , and many other primetime shows, Slesar has been pleasantly surprised by the freedom he's found in daytime TV. "A nighttime writer," he points out, "loses completely. On a soap, time works on your side. A producer cannot possibly tear things up and change them. Because what about tomorrow which ties in with today and the day after that? You have much tighter control over the production, the actors, everything."

Within limits, Slesar's even able to experiment. During a trial sequence on Edge , it occurred to me that the defense attorney's summation was the heart of one day's show and everything else extraneous. So he made the entire show one speech delivered by actor Don May. The producer Erwin Nicholson remembers this as the most exciting episode ever.

Slesar's devotion to the serial form is reciprocated by his audiences. In Minneapolis two-and-a-half-years ago, Channel 4 announced that it Edge would be pre-empted for live coverage of an interstate-highway opening. The announcement just happened to made on a cliff-hanging Friday with an innocent woman due to be hanged Monday, the day of the promised pre-emption. Incensed fans bombarded the station with calls and threatened to picket. One even suggested hanging the responsible officials.   Channel 4 taped the show and played it after the freeway ceremony.

Henry's energy and expertise are richly recognized by Procter & Gamble which owns and produces both his shows and prohibits him from working with anyone else on daytime TV.  His gross annual income from the two shows alone is in the neighborhood of $350, 000.  From this he pays his agent, subwriters, secretary, and murderous tax bill.

What spurs him on and on though is not so much the money,  which he won't deny he likes,  but the satisfaction he gets from conceiving plots, manipulating characters, putting words into their mouths.  As an unhappy child in a broken home,  one of his great thrills was discovering at age 8 he could mesmerize the kids on the block with his ghost stories.  When he began selling science fiction and mystery stories,  it was  "like tasting blood,  unimaginable that people would pay me for doing what I enjoyed."

A Freudian might infer that his near total immersion in make believe dramatic worlds relates to an escape from personal inner demons,  but if that's so,  his wife Jan couldn't care less.  "What culd make for a better marriage," she smiles,  "than a husband who's happier at his work than most men are playing golf and who's here at home with me almost all the time?".