He returned to reporting. He did
odd pieces of editing. He tried his hand at one-act plays. He even
ventured upon advertisement writing. And all the while, the best that he
could get out of his industry was a meagre living.
In 1905, tiring of the uncertainties of this life, he accepted a post on
the staff of Street & Smith, the millionaire publishers of cheap
magazines, servant-girl romances and dime-novels, and here, in the very
slums of letters, he laboured with tongue in cheek until the next year.
The tale of his duties will fill, I daresay, a volume or two in the
autobiography on which he is said to be working; it is a chronicle full
of achieved impossibilities. One of his jobs, for example, was to reduce
a whole series of dime-novels, each 60,000 words in length, to 30,000
words apiece. He accomplished it by cutting each one into halves, and
writing a new ending for the first half and a new beginning for the
second, with new titles for both. This doubling of their property
aroused the admiration of his employers; they promised him an assured
and easy future in the dime-novel business.
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