heart is
in it no longer. The editor of one of the largest magazines in the
country said to me not long ago that he found the greatest difficulty
now in procuring short stories by writers for whom his magazine had
trained the public to clamor. The immediate reason which he ascribed for
this state of affairs was that the commercial rewards offered to these
writers by the moving picture companies were so great, and the
difference in time and labor between writing scenarios and developing
finished stories was so marked, that authors were choosing the more
attractive method of earning money. The excessive commercialisation of
literature in the past decade is now turned against the very magazines
which fostered it. The magazines which bought and sold fiction like soap
are beginning to repent of it all. They have killed the goose that laid
the golden eggs.

This fight for sincerity in the short story is a fight that is worth
making. It is at the heart of all that for which I am striving. The
quiet sincere man who has something to tell you should not be talked
down by the noisemakers. He should have his hearing. He is real. And we
need him.

That is why I have set myself the annual task of reading so many short
stories. I am looking for the man and woman with something to say,--who
cares very much indeed about how he says it. I am looking for the man
and woman with some sort of a dream, the man or woman who sees just a
little bit more in the pedlar he passes on the street than you or I do,
and who wishes to devote his life to telling us about it. I want to be
told my own story too, so that I can see myself as other people see me.
And I want to feel that the storyteller who talks to me about these
things is as much in earnest as a sincere clergyman, an unselfish
physician, or an idealistic lawyer. I want to feel that he belongs to a
profession that is a sort of priesthood, and not that he is holding down
a job or running a bucket shop.

I have found this writer with a message in almost every magazine I have
studied during the year. He is just as much in earnest in _Collier's
Weekly_ as he is in _Scribner's Magazine_. I do not find him often, but
he is there somewhere. And he is the only man for whom it is worth our
while to watch. I feel that it is none of my business whether I like and
agree with what he has to say or not. All that I am looking for is to
see whether he means what he says and makes it as real as he can to m