Yes, in The Cynic's Dictionary I did "jump from A to M." I had previously done the stuff in various papers as far as M, then lost the beginning. So in resuming I re-did that part (quite differently, of course) in order to have the thing complete if I should want to make a book of it. I guess the Examiner isn't running much of it, nor much of anything of mine.
* * *
I like your love of Keats and the early Coleridge.
Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.
The N. Y.
American Office,
Washington, D. C.,
October 12,
1904.
My dear Davis,
The "bad eminence" of turning down Sterling's great poem is one that you will have to share with some of your esteemed fellow magazinists—for examples, the editors of the Atlantic, Harper's, Scribner's, The Century, and now the Metropolitan, all of the élite. All of these gentlemen, I believe, profess, as you do not, to know literature when they see it, and to deal in it.
Well I profess to deal in it in a small way, and if Sterling will let me I propose some day to ask judgment between them and me.
Even you ask for literature—if my stories are literature, as you are good enough to imply. (By the way, all the leading publishers of the country turned down that book until they saw it published without them by a merchant in San Francisco and another sort of publishers in London, Leipzig and Paris.) Well, you wouldn't do a thing to one of my stories!