Dear Anderson: Waiting on shoppers in a book store during the holiday hurricane deferred my answer to your letter. I was glad to get any kind of work, however, after my empty-pocketed summer and fall. Now I am working as a copy-writer for the Corday and Gross Co. here which you may have heard of. I like this better than any bread-and-butter work I’ve ever done. You were right about the real estate job. Ogling poor people for small investments against their will didn’t appeal to me very long. I had given it up before you wrote. If I can satisfy the requirements of my position here, I shall feel a little hope returning for the satisfaction of a few aims again. I mean, of course, to turn out a little verse or prose this winter. When out of work I am not able to rid myself of worries enough to accomplish anything. Some pecuniary assurances seem necessary to me to any opening of the creative channels. Now things begin to look a little better for me. I saw your story “The Contract” in the last _Broom_, and would like to offer a criticism. It may be an infraction, but if it is I want to ask your forgiveness. This story in some ways strikes me as inferior to the intensity and beauty of your other recent work, and I have an idea that it is something you wrote quite a while ago. Coming from anyone else, I would think, “This is good; but this fellow is trying to imitate Anderson and can’t quite do it.” I wouldn’t attempt any suggestions nor try to point out any places. Your work is always too much a composite whole for that critical sort of prodding to yield anything. I only felt this story as somehow an anti-climax to the amazing sense of beauty I recently got in re-reading the short stories you have done during the last few years that are collected together in the _Egg_ volume. Please pardon me for this doubtless unnecessary comment. It is only in the light of my own desires and feeling in such circumstances that I have ventured it.