He had been living in a down-town Y.M.C.A., but when he quit the task of making sow-ear purses out of sows’ ears, he moved uptown and went to work immediately as a reporter for The Sun. He kept at this for a year, doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one day an infelicitous incident peremptorily closed his newspaper career. On a February afternoon he was assigned to report a parade of Squadron A. Snow threatening, he went to sleep instead before a hot fire, and when he woke up did a smooth column about the muffled beats of the horses’ hoofs in the snow…. This he handed in. Next morning a marked copy of the paper was sent down to the City Editor with a scrawled note: “Fire the man who wrote this.” It seemed that Squadron A had also seen the snow threatening—and had postponed the parade until another day.

The Beautiful and Damned