American letters, Walter H. Page, of Doubleday, Page & Co.,
was made ambassador to England, where "Sister Carrie" is regarded
(according to the Harpers), as "the best story, on the whole, that has
yet come out of America." A curious series of episodes. Another proof,
perhaps, of that cosmic imbecility upon which Dreiser is so fond of
discoursing....

But of all this I shall say more later on, when I come to discuss the
critical reception of the Dreiser novels, and the efforts made by the
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to stop their sale. 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. 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 accomplish