inland locality worthy of nation-wide attention.
Everything I wrote bounced back with a printed rejection slip.

At last, however, I discovered a "story" that appeared to be of
undeniable national appeal. Missouri, for the first time in thirty-six
years, had elected a Republican governor. I decided that the surest
market for this would be a magazine dealing with personality sketches.
If a magazine of that type would not buy the "story," I was willing to
own myself whipped.

On the afternoon when we were all sure that Herbert Hadley had won, I
begged a big lithographed portrait of the governor-elect from a cigar
store man who had displayed it prominently in his front window. There
was no time, then, to search for a photograph. A thrill of conviction
pervaded me that at last my fingers were on a "story" that no magazine
editor, however much he might hate to recognize the worth of new
authors, could afford to reject.

The newspaper office files of clippings gave me all the information
necessary for a brief biography; the lithograph should serve for an
illustration. By midnight that Irresistible Wedge for entering the
magazines was in the mails.... Sure enough, the editors of _Human Life_
bought it. And, by some miracle of speed in magazine making never
explained to this day, they printed it in their next month's issue.

The moral of this was obvious--that in the proper market a real "story,"
even though it be somewhat hastily written, will receive a sincere
welcome. The week after this Irresistible Wedge appeared in print I
threw up my job as a reporter and dived off of the springboard into free
lancing. A small bank account gave me assurance that there was no
immediate peril of starving, and I wisely kept a connection with the
local newspaper. In case disaster overtook me, I knew where I could find
a job again.

CHAPTER V

A BEGINNER'S FIRST ADVENTURES

What happened to me in making a beginning as a free lance producer of
non-fiction might happen to any one else of an equal amount of
inexperience. My home town had no professional magazine writer to whom I
could turn for advice; and though I devoured scores of books about
writing, they were chiefly concerned either with the newspaper business
or with the technique of fiction, and they all failed to get down to
brass tacks about my own pressing problem, which was how to write and
sell magazine articles. I was not seeking any more ABC advice about
newspaper