'Why did you write that book?' The questioners do not want an
answer to that immediate question; but to the implied question: 'Why don't
you write some other kind of book?' To either question there is but one
answer: BECAUSE.

"Every writer is thus challenged. The writer of comic stories is asked why
he doesn't write something really serious. The novelist is asked why he
doesn't write short stories, and the short-story writer is asked why he
doesn't write a novel. To me people say, impatiently: 'Why don't you write
happy stories about ordinary people?' And the only answer I can give them
is: 'Because I can't. I present life as I see it.'

"I am an ordinary man, but I don't understand ordinary men. I am at a loss
with them. But with the people of whom I write I have a fellow-feeling. I
know them and their sorrows and their thwarted strivings and I understand
their aberrations. I cannot see the romance of the merchant or the glamour
of the duke's daughter. They do not permit themselves to be seized and
driven by passion and imagination. Instead they are driven by fear, which
they have misnamed Commonsense. These people thwart themselves, while my
people are thwarted by malign circumstance.

"Often I have taken other men to the dire districts about which I write,
and they have remained unmoved; they have seen, in their phrase, nothing
to get excited about. Well, one cannot help that kind of person. One
cannot give understanding to the man who regards the flogging of children
as a joke, or to whom a broken love-story is, in low life, a theme for
smoking-room anecdotes.

"Wherever there are human creatures there are beauty and courage and
sacrifice. The stories in _Whispering Windows_ deal with human creatures,
thieves, drunkards, prostitutes, each of whom is striving for happiness in
his or her way, and missing it, as most of us do. Each has hidden away
some fine streak of character, some mark below which he will not go.
And--they are alive. They have met life in its ugliest phases, and fought
it.

"My answer, then, to the charge of writing 'loathsome' stories, is that
these things happen. To those who say that cruelty and degradation are not
fit subjects for fiction, I say that all twists and phases of the human
heart are fit subjects for fiction.

"The entertainment of hundreds of thousands with 'healthy' literature is a
great and worthy office; but the author can only give out what is in him.
If I write of wretched