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He discovered me by walking in on me when I was editing Smith's Magazine and so long ago as 1905. He was, as I thought, writing the best humorous short stories that I have ever seen produced in America. They were realistic, so wise, so ironic, and in some ways, so amusing, and in their way beautiful. I bought them for Smith's Magazine, which as I have just said I was then editing for Street and Smith in 1904 and 1905. Fort came to me with these stories; and since I had never read any like them anywhere, I decided that he was certain to make a great reputation. Some of his writings suggested mental clowning, but they had wisdom and beauty, an entirely different kind of mood and material viewpoint. I think I published six or seven or eight. And other editors did the same. And among ourselves, Richard Duffy of Tom Watson's, Charles Agnew MacLean of the Popular Magazine, and others, we loved to talk of him and his future: a new and rare literary star. But presently, he quit writing them. That was after I left Smith's and became the editor of Hampton's Magazine. That is, after I became editor of Hampton's, I sent for him and told him that now that I had moved I wanted more. Also that there I could pay him much more: one hundred or one hundred and twenty-five dollars as against twenty or thirty, or even perhaps forty dollars, which was what he used to get from Street and Smith's, and others, I presume, but no more. More, as I understood it at that time, he needed the money; for always, as I knew, he lived on about five cents a day, and I thought for him this larger price would be a great incentive and that he would give me as many stories as I wished. But imagine my astonishment, as well as chagrin, when most calmly he announced that he wasn't writing short stories anymore. No. He was working on a new book, X, and nothing could take him away from that.
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