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11B

The stock market crash, which had occurred just before we left, quickly changed everything. We were back in New York with two novels to peddle. Work of any sort was hard to find; people with one or two novels already published were looking for a book review to do here and there. [[strikethrough]] It was the [[/strikethrough]] The mailbox became the most fateful object as we waited for publishers to answer. Ours was just inside a gate made of iron rods at the end of a narrow walk past the front house. It was a full three months before I had word on mine, and then the fact that it was turned down "with regret" helped none. While it was at the second publisher's, Scribner's magazine announced a novella contest, and I took [[strikethrough]] a [[/strikethrough]] the carbon of an earlier short novel I had not tried to publish, and began cutting and patching and rewriting until it finally came out the proper length. The second and third and fourth publishers turned down both of our books. It was little help that my novella [[strikethrough]] I [[/strikethrough]] was among the five [[strikethrough]] of the novellas to be thrown out, the editors wrote. [[/strikethrough]] last ones seriously considered.

I got pneumonia, and [[strikethrough]] after [[/strikethrough]] spent several weeks in St. Vincent's Hospital. Dreiser went to see me there, and out of the fog of fever that [[strikethrough]] was like a [[/strikethrough]] closed me in as if I were in a glass cage I herd him screaming at the nuns to get me [[strikethrough]] in a [[/strikethrough]] out of the ward and into a private room. The nurse told me later that he had said, "What are you saving them for, the saints?" He sent his own doctor over to see me. And another friend sent Dr. Mary Halton, who furnished more diaphrams for writers and artists than anyone else in New York. [[strikethrough]] A [[/strikethrough]] The friend told me that Molly stirred [[strikethrough]] them [[/strikethrough]] up the staff by commanding, "Save the bright ones. Let the others go, save the bright ones." 

I remember that the first time I had ever seen Dr. Halton she asked me if I worked, and when I said No, I wrote, she demanded "You say writing isn't work? It;s the hardest work you could [[strikethrough]] find [[/strikethrough]] undertake!"