I began to write at nineteen. After high school, from which I had barely succeeded in being graduated, I worked for a year in a mail-order house, failed to save a cent, hung around cheap dance-halls, and grew youthfully cynical and desperate.

I was exceedingly egotistical. I suppose I was born that way, but here are a few things which contributed to it. My parents, who had a struggle of it in America, had been taught that this is the land of opportunity, which they taught to me. By "the land of opportunity" they meant, and I understood, that it was a land where, by trying hard, I could become more distinguished, wealthier, more powerful, and happier than any one else. And the streets of New York's East Side taught me that usually you win if you hit first and hit hard, that nothing is so important as "getting away with it," and that if you do one thing well once, everybody believes that you can do many things well often, and that you can live for a long time on such an achievement.

§ 2

Well, being exceedingly egotistical, I believed myself an authority on magazine short stories. I had read feature articles on the fabulous sums paid to writers, and I believed implicitly that if "The Saturday Evening Post" published one story, you were "made," and could write for the rest of your life and be famous. So I wrote a story entitled "Forgetting Eleanor." Its plot is a direct influence of O. Henry. Its material came from my high-school experience with a snubnosed, dull-eyed girl who wore sleazy waists and rouged and had an imbecile simper. I had tried to kiss

her, which was the conventional thing, but she had repulsed me, which made me want to kiss her; and that made a story. My nature is to write warmly and colorfully of emotions, but here I used O. Henry's method. He handles emotion slantingly, shamefacedly, as a man furtively might give a coin to a beggar. That is the way I wrote, and the effect is correct, unimportant, and unoriginal. A magazine bought the story three years later for fifteen dollars.

Then I made up my mind to go to college in order that I might become educated, write stories, be celebrated, and have money. I spent my freshman year at Lewis Institute in Chicago, for which I shall always be grateful. For there I met Professor Edwin Herbert Lewis, who, I believe, has grasped the idea of democracy more concretely in his daily life than any man I have ever known. He realizes that it requires gifts of a high order to make simple cultural ideas comprehensible to simple people. He has read many books on many subjects and he has understood them, and yet he stands jovially and magnificently humble in the presence of a freshman. Reading "Forgetting Eleanor," he saw, as any Ph.D. would have seen, that it was an insignificant atom in a universe of insignificant atoms; but he also saw, as any mother would have seen, that it was a creative effort of a living youth. And therefore he said pleasant things about it-pleasant things, things so exquisitely chosen that I believed and was enlightened at the same time; and then he said things which, within the next month, made me rewrite the story seven times. For hours he listened to my childish yammering. Not once did he say, "You are a con

ceited, ignorant, vulgar, horribly selfcentered, over-intense child." Not once did he remark deadeningly: "That is not a discovery, young man. Thousands of people have thought it at various times in the last two thousand years, and most of them were not particularly wise people."

Since then I have met few teachers who would have done what this man has done for me and for hundreds of others. I feel that this fact is the signal failure of democracy to-day.

§ 3

I went to the University of Illinois then, a sophomore, and registered in a short-story course. My instructor was an intelligent young man of New England predilections. I think his ancestry was Bostonian. He gave me the impression then of being that kind of person, though, as I was not in the least equipped for recognizing and classifying the products of various American regions, my impression must not be taken seriously as regards his derivation. When I say he was intelligent, I offer my opinion of to-day. As a sophomore I should have been likely to say, with offensive finality, that he was not. He was, I thought, polite, meticulous, modest, inquiring, patient, indecisive, kindhearted, and utterly without knowledge of the world. By "world" I meant, without quite realizing it, me and my kind. I had little confidence in his opinions on anything, even books. He spoke often, and with expansive respect, of literary style. I became I became curious about it despite my feeling that literary style, like style in clothes or the way one combs one's hair, is something no truly masculine person talks about, and that if one does un

derstand it or is interested in it, he should have the good taste to hide his weakness. He answered my question by quoting a definition of style. I do not recall it, but it confirmed me in my attitude toward literary style and toward him.

Four years later I made an exciting discovery. It came to me that O. Henry wrote as a particular person to a particular audience. I fancied a college instructor, discharged for drunkenness, drifting up and down the American Continent, finding himself one balmy night in a smoking compartment with a business man, a poet, and a longshoreman, and expounding life so as to interest all three. "Why, that 's O. Henry's style!" I cried. And it came to me that Gouverneur Morris often wrote as a high-born American man of the world about forty, in a big-brotherly mood, might talk to a nice girl of sixteen. That was his style. Good style, therefore, was the manner of a distinguished person writing for distinguished people. And the problem of a writer, therefore, was to become at least a person, and to find a particular audience.

I 'm doubtful about how good a definition of style this is, but to me it gave a new interest, a personal interest, in books and in writing and in lifean interest which this instructor, who gave me the lowest possible passing grade, failed in the least to awaken. He told me that he could not discuss my work with me, because it was the sort of work he could not endure. In order to esteem myself, I had to despise him; therefore I did. But his attitude got to me, and in three years I wrote only one story, a sentimental, stupid tale of two people on a desert island, a tale that tried laboriously

to be humorous. A year ago I destroyed it. I still shudder at its memory.

After leaving college, I went back to Chicago, and, being engaged, had to get a job, so that I could get married. I found that the fact that I was a college graduate made some business men contemptuous, impressed some enough to inform me that now, with "practical" knowledge on top of my knowledge of "theory," I might amount to something,—that is, make money, and amused others, who said that it would take me at least a year to unlearn everything I had learned. I felt, somehow, that I had been a sort of intellectual chorus man and that now it was for me to redeem myself. Everywhere I saw busy of fices, bustling men, swift elevators, heard the click of the type-writer, which sometimes I think will strangle all the music of the world, and witnessed a drama of absorption so vast, so alive, and so grand that, with scarcely a protest, I was swept along as an actor. I reacted swiftly to the business man's contempt for the pedagogue and as swiftly to the business man's reverence for himself, and wrote "The Conqueror," a story glorifying the romance of business, its mightiness, and its importance to the soul, yet at the same time showing in a blundering way the development of some critical tendencies; for my hero, David Burns, was not perfect. He had faults; stock faults, but faults.

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was there to give me, gently and insidiously, any sort of perspective on that great American institution, the magazine? How can any one blame an untutored young person with literary leanings, seeing manycolored magazine stands, and hearing of the unbelievable prices paid to popular writers, for feeling that the greatest achievement in life would be to have a story in a popular magazine, illustrated by a popular artist?

Add to this the glamour of the companionship of a prosperous and a successful young short-story writer, a picturesque person who had been educated on the Continent. He wrote deliberately for money, loved Browning, the Bible, George Moore, and Charles E. Van Loan, had what I believed to be the manner of a European aristocrat, and believed in me.

I

I was with him day and night for two months, and suddenly found what I conceived to be a way of swinging my pen. Until then I had clutched it. I wrote a story "Ain't you Comin' back?" It is melodrama, attempting to redeem itself with a sentimental "twist" in the O. Henry manner. had learned some of the tricks of craftsmanship by that time,―toil and my not exceptional sense of form had taught them to me,—and Sewall Haggard, then editor of "Hearst's," said, "If you will write of people and emotions with which you are familiar instead of China and revenge and virtue outraged, I think you can get into our magazine.”

With what was I familiar? The University of Illinois? To all intents and purposes it was ten thousand miles away. Business? I was becoming skeptical about it and could no longer glow about millionaires. Love? I

was in love; so I wrote about the East Side of New York, which I had left ten years before, and now returned to casually and indifferently. The story, "The Happiness of Rebecca," while sentimental and conventional, is the first thing I did which at all satisfied me. I had seen a real character, and I had been able to present it in dramatic form; but my method was that of Fannie Hurst, and my style an imitation of my brilliant friend's. "Hearst's" bought it, and I returned to Chicago, got married, and prepared to live by writing.

I tried to write another East Side story, and wrote drivel. I could n't do life as I saw it, for I had no perspective. Nothing I had learned in college helped me now to stand off, and in some degree understand adequately, my world. To the lectures in the classroom I had barely listened. I had felt that the lecturers, repeating what they had read in books, were inferior men because they did not understand me or the youth next to me, and I believed that if they did not understand us, they could not possibly understand the books.

I had to get a job, and the editor of a string of popular magazines offered me work as his assistant. Every day I judged the "availability" of manuscripts. I learned to think of manuscripts as stock in trade, of authors as machinery of production to be maintained at low cost, but I learned virtually nothing of life or of literature. Two stories I wrote at that time about people I had never met and places I had never visited finally found a place in a magazine.

I went into advertising work, and

for more than a year I wrote no stories. I could not. As soon as I began to think, it hurt; so I ceased thinking. But I read promiscuously, without much understanding and with little thinking. I read "The Smart Set," much for the same reasons, I suppose, that young men to-day read "Live Stories" and "Snappy Stories." I also read "The Nation" and "The New Republic." I liked the vigorous erudition with which the writers in those magazines expressed themselves. For perhaps the first time in my life I was becoming really impressed with erudition. I think I did not understand any five consecutive paragraphs in these magazines, but I read on and on; thus, when I picked up "The Education of Henry Adams," I was not dismayed. I read it. through. Some day I shall read it again, for I should like to know what it was all about.

In the meantime the war had come, and my eyes had kept me out of it. I suffered for a while from a romantic desire to be in it. I frankly confessed ignorance of the political, economic, and philosophical issues, but I clung blindly to the fact that I believed in struggle and that any fight was better than no fight and a big fight better than a little one.

The war, "The New Republic," "The Nation," "The Smart Set," "The Education of Henry Adams," and the nature of the life around me then compelled me to think seriously and objectively of myself, and from that thinking came an intense desire to identify myself intelligently with some great and significant social group. America alone did not seem enough then, and being a Jew and nothing but a Jew meant less than

nothing. The idea of a dignified and brave combination of the two came to me, and I expressed it in a story called "Terrible as an Army with Banners."

I believed then, as I do now, in the inevitability and desirability of the assimilation of the Jews, but I felt that a great impeding factor in its culmination was the very desire to become assimilated, which, it seems to me, is the outstanding peculiarity of all but the aged Jews who have recently come from European Ghettos and a large "miscellaneous" class, including many intellectuals. On the face of it, when one considers the clannishness of certain classes of Jews in America, this might seem a preposterous statement. But if one probes more deeply, it becomes more plausible.

The average Jew who comes to America is, like the average Irishman, Swede, Italian, and German, of low caste. He is, very likely, ignorant (even if volubly literate in the Torah and the Talmud), vulgar, poverty-stricken. When he has been in America, say, twenty years, he, as well as the Irishman, Swede, Italian, and German, is still ignorant and vulgar. But there is one difference. He has been so sharpened, so intensified by his life in Europe that his longing for money, to him the immediate and only symbol of success, has developed into an invincible technic, profoundly rooted in his character. He has the gift of accumulation. Thus, after twenty years, we find him still vulgar and ignorant, but wealthy. He lives now uptown, a neighbor of the more refined American bourgeois. And in this atmosphere, particularly since he does n't carry with him some specific, admirable background or tra

dition to give legitimate color and stamina to his crude manifestations, he becomes obnoxious, whereas we do not object to the vulgar Irishman in Irish slums, to the vulgar Italian in Italian slums.

Why has he moved uptown? Why does he name his children Irving instead of Isidor, Sidney instead of Samuel, Jack instead of Jacob, Martin instead of Moses? Because he wants to be like his neighbors, to be accepted by them. He fails to realize that he is not civilized to their standard; his wife, even more than he, fails to realize this. It is the nouveau riche situation, greatly intensified, given race flavor, and with a curious twist.

The twist is this, that, being snubbed by his neighbors, as a corncob-smoking Murphy would be, as a garlic-reeking Tony would be, as a heavy-handed Sven Svensen would be, he turns back to himself, and the Martins, the Irvings, the Sidneys, and the Jacks have an empty, feverish time of it exclusively in one another's company. Their children and grandchildren make another story, and a more beautiful one.

The way out of this, it seemed then and seems now to me, is for the Jew to identify himself proudly and intelligently with his past and to present this past with dignity as his greatest credential as an American, to offer the gold of his history and tradition for the melting-pot. It is noble to come bravely as Jacob; it is disgraceful to attempt to sneak in as Jack.

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My interest in the Jew flagged for a while. We had moved into a more expensive apartment. I bought an imported English suit of clothes. Occasionally we took a taxicab, and oc