There are so many stories like this nowadays. And I cannot recall even one where the author did not send the article.

Related:

If you want to read an academic article and it’s behind a paywall, even odds that at least one of the authors has a PDF of it on his or her web page.

When the Web was a very new thing, my little son, then eight y/o, wanted to use an illustration. I taught him to never steal, always attribute.

So we sent an email to the artist. He wrote back, thrilled - and asked for a copy of the "book" my son was writing.

I didn't know that asking the author directly for their articles work! You must have been lucky to get such a quick response.

I love the connection that happens with asking authors directly. Once, I asked an author for a copy of a French book chapter they had written in the 90s. They responded a few weeks later, sharing the original English draft for it, but also recommended I look at some of their newer work on the topic which was slightly revised.

It's what we did before the internet. Academic departments had preprinted reprint request postcards.
I remember Imre Lakatos sending me a whole bundle of stuff, and then suddenly died a couple of weeks later.

Sometimes it takes what it takes. To translate Jacques Derrida's Le Toucher-Jean-Luc Nancy, I e-mailed an author, cold-called a French bookstore to buy an edition of an 1970s out-of-print paperback book from which the author had quoted, on and on. It was arduous but the result was good.

the only time I’ve ever had an author say no to me asking if I could have an article I didn’t have subscription access to was when it was new enough to be under embargo and even then they’re usually willing to send a preprint