The Sunday Gentleman Read Online Free PDF

the effect of putting off some serious readers.
    Neither a largely favorable press, nor the enormous circulation that this novel of mine finally achieved in the United States and abroad, could fully undo the temporary harm committed by a popular periodical’s angle. As a magazine writer, I had always been uncomfortable with the demands of my employers for an angle. As a novelist, my resentment of it has been acutely intensified.
    This persistent necessity for using an angle, then, as well as the lack of respect for and censorship of a writer’s words that came from both magazine publishers and story subjects, and above all, the almost constant lack of freedom to write as one wished, were reasons why I left the magazine field, and I have never regretted my decision, even for a day.
    Still, it would be unfair, even dishonest, of me to say that I did not derive considerable pleasure and excitement from my two decades in the magazine field. Between 1931 and 1953, I published around five hundred articles and short stories, perhaps one piece of fiction for every nine pieces of nonfiction. I suppose I also wrote an equal number of articles and short stories that remained unpublished, although some of them represented my better Sunday writing. As a youngster, before 1940, I would write for whoever would publish me: Horse and Jockey Magazine, American Farm Youth Magazine, Catholic Digest, Current Psychology and Psychoanalysis, For Men Only, Ken, Modern Mechanics, Thrilling Sports, Modern Screen . Later, my markets, while still as diverse, improved in prestige and circulation: The Saturday Evening Post, American Mercury, Esquire, Liberty Magazine, Collier’s, Coronet, The Rotarian, Saturday Review of Literature, American Legion Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Literary Cavalcade, Pageant, Reader’s Digest, This Week, True .
    In quest of stories for those publications and others, I traveled widely, collected adventures, knowledge, renowned and bizarre personalities, knew hours and days of thrills and experiences that would probably have been impossible to acquire in other fields of endeavor. I remember interviewing Huey Long while he, clad in silk pajamas in a New Orleans hotel suite, told me that his forebears had been blessed with great longevity, and that he expected to live until ninety-nine (this, a year before his assassination). I remember spending two grueling days climbing 17,000-foot Mount Ix-taccihuatl, outside Mexico City. I remember accompanying an expedition into the heat of the Honduran jungles to discover a freak of nature called the Fountain of Blood, and being received by the President of El Salvador for performing this feat.
    I remember, the year before Pearl Harbor, secretly interviewing an American in Nanking, China, an authority on Japan’s vicious policy of drugging the population of occupied China with heroin and opium, and being interrogated by the Japanese Dangerous Thought police for my curiosity, I remember, also months before Pearl Harbor, a long meeting with Yosuke Matsuoka, the Foreign Minister of Japan who had signed the Axis Pact with Hitler, and his outburst which warned me that Japan was prepared to go to war with the United States—and the reactions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and United States Army G-2 (waiting for me when I returned to San Francisco).
    I remember Alexander Kerensky, and our conversation in a Los Angeles hotel room, and his bitterness about his failure to thwart Lenin and Bolshevism in revolutionary Russia. I remember Leni Reifenstahl, who was amiable enough to lift her skirt to her navel to display a surgical scar, and who became angry only when I suggested that she had been Hitler’s mistress. I remember an afternoon with W. C. Fields at his home, and his showing me framed caricatures of celebrities he hated, several of them pornographic, each covered with chaste little curtains, and one being of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the comedian then