A reader recently wrote to say she enjoyed hearing about my beginnings as a writer. This got me musing, and as I mused I remembered that most people, including people in their seventies as I am, are unaware that before television took over the world in the 1950s, there were several hundred mainstream magazines and thousands of newspapers in America publishing short stories and poetry. Thousands!
Which is to say, before televisions were installed in every home, there was an enormous demand for short stories in our culture, with high-end magazines such as Collier’s Weekly and Harper’s Magazine paying very good money for short stories, with many movies made in those days based on short stories.
For instance, Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life is based on a story first published as a pamphlet in the 1940s by Philip Van Doren Stern and subsequently published in Reader’s Scope and Good Housekeeping before Capra bought the movie rights for 50,000 dollars. Yes, Good Housekeeping published short stories!
Then television conquered American society and culture, and within a decade the golden era of short stories was over. The time people used to spend reading short stories was now given to watching the tube. By the early 1970s, when I was in my twenties, there were only a few dozen magazines left that paid well for stories, mostly Men’s and Women’s magazines, and nearly all the stories they published were by established writers.
Nevertheless, in those days before the internet, before there were affordable ways to self-publish and distribute stories and books, thousands of aspiring writers bought The Writer’s Market every year, a volume listing all the magazines supposedly open to considering unsolicited (non-agented) stories and articles. This mighty tome, updated annually, was something of a fraud since most of the magazines listed therein would only consider stories sent to them by established literary agents, though many of the listings said otherwise.
I sent my stories to magazines large and small, collected rejection letters galore, and then in 1972, through a series of seeming coincidences and lucky breaks, a New York literary agent asked if she might represent me. Her name was Dorothy Pittman and she was among the very last literary agents in America who would gladly submit short stories to magazines for her known and unknown clients.
Even more remarkably, she was eager to represent what is now known as Literary Fiction, which has come to mean non-genre fiction. Sci-fi, Mystery, Young Adult, Fantasy, and Historical Romance are some of the most popular genres. By the 1970s non-genre fiction was becoming less and less saleable, and today Literary Fiction is a genre most publishers shudder to consider.
All the editors to whom Dorothy submitted my stories and books were middle-aged, extremely well read, and interested in unique writers, not copycats. None of them lasted long in the biz after the giant multi-national corporations completed their takeover of the publishing industry by the early 1980s.
In her first two years as my agent, Dorothy marketed my novella that had drawn her to represent me, two of my novels, and dozens of my short stories. She got several nibbles, but no takers.
One day Dorothy called the commune where I was living in Santa Cruz and said in her charming Georgia drawl, “Dahlin’, I’m getting so frustrated not selling anything of yours. I’ve got several editors who love your writing, but you’re not famous and your stories are a bit edgy, if you know what I mean.” She paused. “Have you sent me everything you’ve written?”
“Except for my stories in a folder labeled No Way,” I said despondently. “Otherwise, yes.”
“Send me those,” she said, and I did.
Fast-forward a year. By then I’d left Santa Cruz for Menlo Park where I worked as a janitor and teacher’s aide in a Day Care Center before moving to Eugene, Oregon where I was living in a converted garage with my girlfriend and desperately looking for a job. Out of the blue, Dorothy called from New York to say Cosmopolitan Magazine wanted to buy my short story Willow for a thousand dollars. Dorothy would take her 10% commission and I would get nine hundred dollars upon publication. For someone who just quit his job cleaning kiddy toilets for three-bucks-an-hour this was a mind-boggling sum.
I frowned. “Willow? The story about the black woman boxer who through a series of implausible flukes gets a chance to box against professional male boxers? Cosmopolitan? Really?”
A month later, down to my last few dollars, a check for nine hundred dollars came in the mail. My monthly nut was fifty dollars. I was rich! Over the next year I completed two novels, one of which was Inside Moves, my first published novel.
However, three years would pass before that miracle occurred. In the meantime, I worked as a landscaper in Medford, Oregon and did very little writing. Then Dorothy sold a story of mine entitled The Swami and the Surfer to Seventeen for five hundred dollars, and Seventeen commissioned me to write a Christmas story for seven hundred dollars.
While I worked on the Christmas story, I continued to labor as landscaper until I saved enough money to travel to New York to meet Dorothy in-person for the first time and meet the magazine editors who had taken a chance on my edgy stories.
I spent four months on the East Coast, thought about relocating there, ran out of money, returned to Oregon, and then moved to Seattle where I fell on very hard times until Doubleday bought Inside Moves for a pittance and Dorothy sold a few more stories for me. Then right before Inside Moves was to be published, New American Library acquired the paperback rights for a large sum, the movie deal was made, and I was lifted out of poverty for several years.
At the publication party for Inside Moves in New York, the editors from Cosmopolitan, Gallery, Seventeen, and Young Miss who had bought my stories were there to celebrate with me, as were editors from Redbook, Penthouse, and Esquire who had never bought a story from me. They came to let me to know they loved my stories and would have published them had I been better known.
Virtually every successful writer in America and England for the hundred years prior to 1970 published short stories in magazines en route to publishing a novel. In those bygone days, writing short stories was the training ground for becoming a professional writer. Striving to publish short stories was the gauntlet writers had to run if they wanted to one day enter the Promised Land of being a published author.
In 1980 I was on a radio show in Sacramento talking about the movie based on Inside Moves that was about to be released. The interviewer asked me how I got started as a writer and I mentioned publishing my first story in Cosmopolitan.
I think I must have sounded slightly embarrassed about my first commercial success coming via a Women’s magazine and not Esquire or The New Yorker, because a few minutes later an elderly woman called into the show and said, “I want you to know, Mr. Walton, you are in fine company having your first story published in Cosmopolitan.” Then she paused for effect. “For Ernest Hemmingway published his first short story in Cosmopolitan, too.”
I have never confirmed this, preferring to believe the delightful caller knew what she was talking about.
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My latest book Good With Dogs and Cats: the adventures of Healing Weintraub is now available in paperback, e-book, and audio book. If you enjoy Literary Fiction, you won’t want to miss Good With Dogs and Cats.
And if you like wonderful jazzy music, check out Todd and Marcia’s new CD Ahora Entras Tu along with our many previous albums on Apple, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, and countless other online music sites.