_At the time, I was on the city staff of the New York Evening World. I was a reasonably busy person in those days. I did assignments, both special and ordinary; I handled my share of the "re-write"--that is, the building, inside the office, of news-stories based on details telephoned in by "leg men" or outside workers; I covered most of the big criminal trials that coincidentally took place; I wrote a page of alleged humor for the color section of the Sunday World and for the McClure syndicate; and every week I turned out a given number of shorter and also supposedly humorous articles for the magazine page of the Evening World._ _In the run of my contemporaneous duties I was detailed to report the trial, in Federal Court, of a famous financier. This trial lasted several weeks. What most deeply impressed me was the bearing of the accused man. Although he had distinguished counsel, he practically conducted his own defense. When the jurors came in with a verdict of guilty and the judge sentenced him to a long term of imprisonment at hard labor, he kept his nerve and his wits. I said to myself that this man would never serve out his sentence; he was too smart for that; he would find a way to beat the law, even though his appeals were denied. And he did._ _On the concluding day of the trial I fell to wondering just what possibly could defeat the will of such a man as this man was. At once a notion jumped into my head and, then and there, sitting at the reporters' table, I decided to write a story focusing about this central idea._ _I had written fiction before--every reporter has--fiction masquerading as the lighter side of the news. But I said to myself that this story should be out-and-out fiction. Such small reputation as I had as a special writer largely was founded on my efforts at humor. But I made up my mind that this story should contain no humor at all._ _Not until six months had passed did I get my chance. In the following summer I went on my annual vacation of two weeks. In the concluding two days of that vacation I wrote the first draft of the yarn, and, back at the shop, in odd moments, I wrote it over again, making, though, only a few changes in the original text, and none at all in the sequence of imaginary events._ _I sent the manuscript to Mr. George Horace Lorimer, Editor of the Saturday Evening Post. He accepted it and invited me to submit other manuscripts to him. But I had to wait another full year--until vacation time came again--before there was opportunity for any more short-story writing. Then I did two more stories. Mr. Lorimer bought them both, and thereby I was encouraged to give up my newspaper job, with its guarantee of a pay envelope every Saturday, for the less certain but highly alluring rôle of a free-lance contributor to weekly and monthly periodicals._