Corporations sometimes hire a journalist to write their history, and the journalist tends to have high expectations. After years of deadlines he sees at last an expanse of time to dig deep, to lay the story out in full, to be well paid. Those at least were Walter Guzzardi's expectations when American International Group, Inc., a huge global insurance company, asked him to write its story, offering a two-year contract at $100,000 a year. For Guzzardi, a thirty-year Time Inc. veteran, who had retired as an assistant managing editor at Fortune, this happy beginning came to a frustrating end.

 When John Wooster, AIG's vice president for communications, came to me in 1992 and asked me to write the company's history, he assured me that "We don't want a puff piece." I took that at face value. I figured that if his boss, Maurice R. Greenberg, the company's c.e.o., had wanted puffery, he'd hire an ad agency.

 AIG has a rich and adventurous past. It was founded in Shanghai in 1919 by an American, Cornelius V. Starr, who sold insurance to local Chinese, tapping a vast market that no other Western company had dared enter. Over its seventy-nine-year history -- during which AIG has had only two chief executives, Starr and Greenberg -- the company opened new markets all over the world, entering Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Europe, even going behind the Iron Curtain. Kicked out of a number of countries by war or revolution, it has shown persistence and resiliency, returning and rebuilding when times cooled. China stands as a perfect example: AIG was forced out by the Japanese in 1941 and returned after World War II -- only to be booted out again by the communists in 1950. Some twenty-five years later "Hank" Greenberg led AIG back to China for the third time.

 I thought all this would make an important addition to the annals of American business -- the company is not well understood -- and I proposed to write the book for commercial publication. I even suggested what I thought was a marvelous title: Taking Risks. All that agreed to, I set about digging into AIG's vast archives, interviewing executives -- I traveled to China to do so, with AIG paying the tab -- organizing a narrative, and passing judgments as fairly as I could. I found that here and there as it reached around the globe over seventy-nine years, AIG had made mistakes. But Greenberg's leadership, punctuated by great leaps in earnings and in stock price, warranted -- and got -- very favorable treatment in my text.

 To keep the project on track, I passed each completed chapter to Wooster and to one of his assistants, Maureen Tully, whom he had assigned part-time to help me find my way around the company. I also sent various sections of the text to the executives most concerned. The ever-helpful Tully was full of praise. But unlike a newsroom, the corporate world provided scanty feedback. Neither Wooster nor Greenberg nor any other AIG executive made substantive suggestions or complaints. Still, the boss's cordiality was a good omen; Greenberg, who has a reputation for being forbidding, could not have been more helpful and agreeable.

But in late 1995, when the 500-page manuscript was completed, the affair turned sour. I had decided that to begin the story in 1919, as I had done in early drafts, delayed for too long the description of today's company. To start with AIG now, and then to flash back, was more complicated but journalistically better, so I reorganized the chapters. But Wooster insisted that the book begin with 1919. And he didn't explain why. He was sounding more like a boss, less like the friendly colleague he had first been. I was beginning to feel like a supplier delivering cans to a supermarket, entitled to be fully paid, which I was, and little else.

Many months went by -- silence everywhere. Tully could not help me; as it turned out, she was leaving AIG. Finally I wrote directly to Greenberg, asking him to release the text to me so that I could look for a commercial publisher. Greenberg never answered, but I got a surprising reply from Wooster: there were serious objections to my manuscript (he didn't say precisely what they were) and it required extensive editing and rewriting (he didn't say who would do the work). Threatened with losing control over my text I requested that my name be withheld from future versions.

 To my knowledge, nothing has happened in the year or more that has passed since.

I don't know what AIG's real objections were, but I can make some assumptions: first, problems may have arisen about the distribution of praise. Although dozens of AIG's principals gave me their time, their apparent lack of interest astounded me. Now, confronted at last with a text, they may all have weighed in with suggestions about how they are presented.

 That question may have had special edge when it came to the part played by the company's founder compared with Greenberg's own. In journalistic terms, there is no difficulty: an inventive and freewheeling founder began it all and a superb manager saved and remade the company. Greenberg may think that I gave Starr too much attention. Or he may worry that I attributed so much of the company's success to Greenberg in a publication that he had endorsed.

I assume that the risk-reward ratio -- a central concept in the insurance business -- may not have come up seriously until my weighty tome hit the desks at AIG. A book like mine would attract reviews, reviewers would find something to criticize. Was the risk worth taking? My own answer is yes, but I was never invited to discuss the point.

I assume too that the hard-working, globe-circling Greenberg may have found himself uneasy in the unaccustomed, time-consuming role of book editor. To postpone the chore indefinitely may have been an attractive option.

Of course, AIG may cite different reasons. When one moves from one culture to another, assumptions are always dangerous.

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