Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/29

 ways youth coming on. Even marriage doesn't settle things for us although for a long time our novelists went on the assumption that it did.

We find ourselves having to be intrigued into the pages of the magazines—and if the magazines are to retain the large circulation they require to do their work of standardization writers must be made to serve their purpose.

The commercialization of the art follows as a perfectly natural result.

The popular writer is then just the man of talent who is willing to sell his talent to the business man who publishes the magazine or to the book publisher after large sales and the more talented he is the better he gets paid. There is a job to be done and he does it, keeping his eye always on the main chance, that is to say on the great unthinking buying public. His position is pretty secure. In America we are in the habit of thinking