The
thing to notice here is that the author's difficulties with "Sister
Carrie" came within an ace of turning him from novel-writing completely.
Stray copies of the suppressed first edition, true enough, fell into the
hands of critics who saw the story's value, and during the first year or
two of the century it enjoyed a sort of esoteric vogue, and
encouragement came from unexpected sources. Moreover, a somewhat
bowdlerized English edition, published by William Heinemann in 1901,
made a fair success, and even provoked a certain mild controversy. But
the author's income from the book remained almost _nil_, and so he was
forced to seek a livelihood in other directions. His history during the
next ten years belongs to the tragicomedy of letters. For five of them
he was a Grub Street hack, turning his hand to any literary job that
offered. He wrote short stories for the popular magazines, or special
articles, or poems, according as their needs varied. He concocted
fabulous tales for the illustrated supplements of the Sunday newspapers.
He rewrote the bad stuff of other men.
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