“‘My God!’ said Mr. Dreiser, looking me over. ‘Another infant come to New York to reform it.’ But after a little talk he offered me a job, editorial work at a good salary.
“‘I’ll have to think that over,’ I said, the temptation of a good regular salary struggling against my plans for writing, and writing only.
“‘No,’ Mr. Dreiser ordered. ‘You sit right there and decide now.’
“So I sat there and thought about it and finally I told him that I wouldn’t take his job. I had stuck out this far and I guessed I could go on.
“‘All right,’ Mr. Dreiser agreed without argument. ‘Stick it out at the writing game if you want to. It won’t be easy, but you will make good. You will have a hard time at first, and you will need pluck. But in five years you will land and land big. As for these stories of yours, I will buy them.’ And he named a sum staggering to my inexperience, though he assured me he was taking advantage of me because I was unknown.
“Well, I kept on writing. I bought a second-hand typewriter and worked it with two fingers and many times I thought of the salary I might have had coming in every week. As Mr. Dreiser said, it wasn’t easy. I made $500 that first year. Things came out my way because I stuck to my plan and always kept my eye on the future—and had the courage to refuse that job.”
Not long afterward Mrs. Willsie’s stories began to appear in the magazines and were unusually popular. She took up the writing of special articles for such periodicals as Harper’s Weekly and Collier’s on important subjects—immigration, divorce, Indians, the United States Reclamation Service. Norman Hapgood, who was then editor of Harper’s Weekly, said of her work: “She has the ability to get at the essentials of a big question, and put it in simple, human terms.”
Mrs. Willsie’s first published novel was The Heart of the Desert, which came out in 1913. It won immediate recognition for her. Richard Le Gallienne, writing an appreciation of Mrs. Willsie in the Book News Monthly of March, 1917, said:
“As a boy, of course, I adored the American Indian of Fenimore Cooper, but, since then, words fail. If I have a bête noire in fiction, nowadays, it is the American Indian. I mention this purely personal peculiarity, merely to emphasize the delight which I took in Mrs. Willsie’s hero in The Heart of the Desert—and his truly heroic wooing and winning of a white girl, with Mrs. Willsie’s, and, I am sure, all her readers’ concurrence. Never was such a masterful wooing, or one brought to winning through such heart-beating suspense, such a grim passionate race for love and life in so wild and star-lit and infinite a setting.”
And he says that therefore “when I say that, in my opinion, The Heart of the Desert is one of the best ‘yarns,’ and, if I may say so, one of the most virile love stories written in our time, it is not from any prejudice in favor of its subject matter.”