Tales from the Jungle

I don’t recall how I first heard of Frank Gruber’s 1967 book, The Pulp Jungle. It’s one of those books that, once you’ve heard about it, you start seeing references everywhere in the writing community. For me, the hype, if you can call it that, always seemed to touch upon three points:

1. If you want to know what it was like to write during the heyday of the pulps, this is the book to read.

2. The book is out of print, and you’ll pay through the nose to snag a copy.

3. Nearly every review I’ve read shares Gruber’s famous lunchtime soup ritual, which neatly encapsulates just how impoverished he was while trying to break into New York City publishing in the 1930s.

I won’t keep you waiting on these points, since I am obliged by the Pulp Jungle code of ethics to disclose them all:

1. Yes, this is the book to read to get a sense of the pulp fiction lifestyle as practiced by writers in the 1930s and 40s, and slightly beyond.

2. Yes, finding an original copy of the book is costly, with prices starting around $50 and quickly shooting into the hundreds. One rare book dealer has for sale a copy of the MS once owned by the author for about $1,300. But now, thanks to Fiction House Press, you can buy a paperback copy for $15.

3. I’ll save the soup story for later. I promise.

Not gonna lie: It’s a weird little book. Gruber tells us in the opener that in 1960 he took a call from a professor at UCLA. Was he THE Frank Gruber who had penned classics of the pulp era? You see, the university was about to launch a Black Mask exhibit…

The call triggers a wave of nostalgia, and Gruber realizes that it has been two decades since he’d written his last story for Black Mask, twenty-seven by the time he got around to writing this brisk, 189-page memoir. Pulp Jungle feels strangely incomplete. For one thing, it ends abruptly in an odd place, and some of the chapters feel rushed as well, almost as if its creator could not be bothered to give it a thorough editing before sharing it with the world. If that does not embody the spirit of the pulp era, I don’t know what does.

Gruber estimates that between 1934 and 1941 he wrote between 600,000 and 800,000 words a year, the equivalent of seven to 10 modern novels a year. In his lifetime, he wrote about 400 short stories, 60 novels, and 200 screenplays for television and the movies (most for projects that were never filmed). He wrote detective stories, adventure stories, love stories, westerns, spy novels, and “spicy” stories (which I take to mean erotica). By the way, I think he grossly undercounts his short story output. In one year alone in the 1930s, he wrote 176 stories. But let's go with 400. It's his book.

Born in Minnesota, he’d longed to write as a boy, after reading a slew of Horatio Alger stories. After a stint in the U.S. Army, he sold his first short story at age 23 for $3.50. In 1927, he landed his first job editing an agricultural newspaper, and eventually moved to a publisher in Iowa, where he edited as many as five of those agri-rags. In between, he wrote and sent rounds of stories to the pulps in New York City.

Just as we do today, as soon as a story was rejected, he sent it in the mail to another editor, using the barely one-decade-old Writer’s Digest as his guide. Between 1932 and 1934, he reports, he wrote about 620,000 words of fiction but never earned a living wage. His dream of becoming a writer plays havoc with his family budget, for in the early decades of the twentieth century, ceaseless rounds of postage cost a fortune.

If he were actually on the ground in New York City, he theorizes, he’d save money on stamps, deliver each manuscript by hand, and meet a ton of editors in the process. In 1934, when the agri-papers tank as a result of the Depression, Gruber sees his chance. He sends his young wife to live with her parents, and boards a train to the Big Apple lugging a suitcase, a typewriter, and $60.

Times are tough. Rent in New York City is exorbitant compared to rent back home. (Upon arrival, he shells out $10.50 for a week’s rent at a hotel.) Over the next seven months, he shares hotel rooms and apartments with other writers. When he gets locked out of one apartment for being late with the rent, he rides the subway all night, trying to keep from nodding off. But golly, at least he wasn’t paying for those damn stamps.

To make ends meet, Gruber patronizes Automats, squirts hot water into a bowl, squeezes in several packets of ketchup, sprinkles crushed soup crackers over the liquid, and slurps it up with a spoon. Instant tomato soup! Cost: $0. He did this for days at a time to stave off hunger.

He estimates that there were about 150 pulp magazines headquartered in New York City, which boggles the mind when you think of the paucity of story markets today. He asserts that 300 writers lived in the New York area who had cracked those markets, with thousands more living in the hinterland wanting in on the action.

The magazines hit the stands with lovely names like Ace Detective, Ace Sports, Ace Western, Ten Detective Aces, Adventure, Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective, Dime Western, Double Action Western, Love Story, Weird Tales, Western Story, and Western Trails. The “kings” were Doc Savage and The Shadow, published by Street & Smith, and of course, Black Mask.

What surprised me was how often Gruber phoned editors to ask if he could stop by to introduce himself and pitch his work. Many blew him off, erecting walls between themselves and the legions of writers who craved access to their offices. Gruber speaks about sneaking past secretaries and assistant editors to find his marks. In some cases, the editors said yes! Off he confidently went to shake hands, talk about his work, the places he’d written, and lob ideas. Sometimes the editors would bite; often they kindly sent him on his way.

It took me a long time to finish this fairly short book because I was frequently pausing mid-sentence to research the names he drops. Many of the editors and writers were unknown to me. In some cases, the big-name editors struck me as different versions of the editors I knew in New York publishing: Highly educated people who had attended upscale universities but who, for whatever reason or lack thereof, had pursued career paths that led straight into the ink-stained trenches.

Joseph Shaw, for example, attended Bowdoin, won an Olympic medal for fencing, served his country in WWI—and eventually edited Black Mask, filling its pages with the work of Hammett, Chandler, and Gardner. Gruber tried many times to crack Shaw’s market. With each rejection, Shaw graciously dissected the pieces to explain why he had declined them, warmly encouraging Gruber to submit something else.

Black Mask nevertheless struggled to survive, and when “Captain” or “Cap” Shaw wouldn’t take a pay cut, he was dismissed and replaced by Fanny Ellsworth, the daughter of a New York banker, and a Barnard graduate who would later in life earn a doctorate in Turkish Studies. Among the writers Ellsworth lured to her pages was Cornell Woolrich.

We watch Gruber struggle to sell his work, and cringe as he dodges landlords, hotel clerks, and bill collectors. When he has missed a series of meals, he fondly recalls an incident in 1932, while he still lived in the midwest. A magazine for salesmen had mistakenly mailed him duplicate payments for a pair of stories, and Gruber had mailed the extra check back with a note explaining the error. 

Now, in 1934, Gruber answers his hotel door one Sunday afternoon, half expecting to be berated by his current hotelier. But no, standing in the hall is a well-dressed giant of a man, who enters and studies Gruber’s digs. “I always wanted to see how a starving writer lived,” says Aron M. Mathieu, who is the owner and editor of the sales magazine whose check Gruber returned two years ago. By chance, Mathieu is also the editor of Writer’s Digest. For two years Mathieu has been curious to meet the writer who returned that check:

“He swore roundly even then that I was the only downright honest writer he had ever heard of. He insisted that no writer on earth, especially one who was as close to the howling wolves as my letter had indicated, would have done such a thing. So that was why he was now visiting me.”

Would Mr. Gruber care to join him for lunch? Mathieu’s treat, of course. Gruber was so hungry that he was out the door like a dog whose ears perk up at the sound of the word treat. Over lunch at Schrafft’s and for three hours later, Mathieu expounded on his new concept: an annual publication that listed market opportunities, in detail, for writers. It would be called…Writer’s Market. If Gruber would consent to collect the data and send it to Cincinnati, Mathieu would pay a munificent $90, with a $40 advance. Gruber leaves Mathieu’s hotel with two beautiful twenties in his wallet.

Cha-ching!

Next, out of the ether, after six months and a raft of rejections, an editor phones on a Friday. His magazine is going to press Saturday, and he needs to fill a gaping hole. Could Gruber write a 5,500-word story overnight? Why, sure, he could! He delivers the story, and scurries back to his digs to wait for news of its acceptance. He never hears a peep. Only when he stops by the magazine days later does the editor tell him, oh, we pay on Fridays. The editor had forgotten to phone.

“It was already on the press. Good story. Do me another next month.”

Double cha-ching!

After that, Gruber’s luck changes. He summons his wife from the midwest, and they set up house in the Big Town. In 1935, he earns $10,000, which amounts to $238,000 in 2026. Soon he is comparing his income to that of doctors and lawyers. But that does not mean his output decreases. No. If anything, he’s maintaining the same number of words, just shaking it up with new opportunities in Hollywood.

His list of friends, editors, and acquaintances grows. He meets Lester Dent and befriends Carroll John Daly—who most credit as the creator of the first series private eye, Race Williams. One night, Gruber and his writer pal Steve Fisher go out on the town with the introverted mama’s boy, Cornell Woolrich, and prank him by grossly inflating their Black Mask earnings. The next day, editor Fanny Ellsworth phones and chastise Gruber for messing with poor, sensitive Woolrich’s head:

“He came tearing in here this morning yelling that I was paying Gruber, Fisher and Torrey four cents a word and he was getting only one and a half cents and he was never going to write for the magazine again!”

In another anecdote that I’ve seen shared in many reviews, Gruber attends a party at the Brooklyn apartment of a writer named George Bruce. Thirty or so guests pack the place, having a blast until about 10 pm, when Bruce suddenly remembers that he promised to deliver a 12,000-word story to an editor tomorrow. His guests offer to clear out, but Bruce won’t hear of it. While the party rages on, he sits at his electric typewriter and dutifully pounds out his story. Four hours later, the manuscript is completed, and Bruce rejoins the party and celebrates by knocking back a dollop of gin. Do the math. That is 3,000 publishable words an hour.

On a drive out west, Gruber stops at the home of Erle Stanley Gardner, who seems like a good egg, and, in those days when communication was far from instantaneous, Gardner happily informs our memoirist that an editor back east wants to buy a western novel that Gruber has written.

Gruber is less charmed by other writers he meets. He nearly comes to blows with Raymond Chandler, who badmouths Fisher, one of Gruber’s oldest writer friends, over a screenwriting dispute. (Chandler would never look Gruber in the eye again, but Gruber insists that that never stopped him from enjoying Chandler’s writing.) A mutual friend, Fred MacIsaac, introduces him to Thomas Wolfe, who bores Gruber to tears speaking all night of his own greatness.

Some time later, Gruber tells us, MacIsaac commits suicide. After years of success in the pulps, he has been unable to sell a story for six months. That’s when it hits you. These people mastered the craft not for awards or acclaim or for personal fulfillment. They did it to put food on the table, to support themselves and their families. If their words did not earn bread, then what good were they? It’s easy to see how a writer might have extended that equation to their own self-worth.

In Hollywood, Gruber meets Frederick Schiller Faust, who wrote under countless pen names but was probably best known as Max Brand, the creator of Dr. Kildare. Gruber describes him as a six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound man who did not so much write scripts as he did conceive stories that were later scripted by other writers. Faust showed up for work at the studio every day with a thermos of whiskey. When he drained the booze by 1 p.m., Faust snuck out for a liquid lunch, followed by a few drinks in the afternoon at a local watering hole.

Drink stoked his courage. He had grown tired of merely writing adventure stories. He craved adventure itself. He longed to live it! By now, it’s the 1940s, and a second World War is raging in Europe. In a bungalow on the Warner Brothers lot, a booze-stoked Faust shares with Gruber and Fisher the news that a military friend has fixed it so Faust can travel as an embedded reporter with infantry fighting in Italy. Off goes the great Max Brand, to launch a new career for himself as a war correspondent for Harper’s Magazine. Six weeks later, he’s dead at age 51.

By contrast, Gruber lives to witness the passing of an era that enriched writers and delighted readers. I get the sense that he’s melancholy about the death of the pulps, but he never admits as much.

Somewhere, before this book launches itself off a cliff, Gruber comes close to offering the secrets of his success. He enumerates, for instance, The Seven Basic Western Plots. And he spells out his “foolproof,” eleven-point method for writing the perfect mystery. Since we are all about mysteries, allow me to share with you the secret. Are you ready?

Colorful hero.

Theme.

Villain.

Background.

Murder method.

Motive.

Clue.

Trick.

Action.

Climax.

Emotion.

Ta-da! I bet you’re trembling with excitement. Now you can go forth and write your own mystery!

Yes, Gruber does give us a tiny bit more. He devotes exactly one paragraph to each point. Just one. Because why waste time dragging it out longer than necessary?

Perhaps that’s how he felt about his memoir. He had said all he had to say, so stopped he writing and sent it off to an editor. The end. He lived only two years more, but somehow managed to write eight or nine books before departing for his next great adventure.

* * * 

You can also read parts of Gruber's book via the Internet Archive.

Thanks for reading! See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

My Master Plan to Defeat the Bots

I am told that the ancient Romans scraped their tongues using a dull, metallic blade that could be inserted in the mouth, and raked along the surface of that organ with two fingers guiding the way. A fully appointed ancient Roman hygiene kit would have dangled on a chain with other essential items like a toothpick, a nail cleaner, and an earwax scoop.

Oh—I’m sorry. Do you find the history of human scraping disgusting? Oh, come now, it’s hardly unusual. As long as there have been humans, we have loved to qopchedy qokedydy qokoloky qokeedy qokedy shedy our filthy bits.

That is to say, humans are just that way. An earwax scoop, a nose-picking device, all the better to qopchedy qom‑lith.

Excuse me. I can’t help spewing gibberish these days. See what I’ve become? And all because I just know they’re watching every word I write.

I am talking about my scrapers. They hang on my every word, and I have learned that you cannot be too careful.

Qokoloky kav‑elthri!

I pay a company a princely sum of kolokys every year to host my website. They offer a handy app that allows me to log in from my phone so I can edit blog posts and webpages on the fly. One feature of that app is the ability to peruse my website analytics. About a year ago, I noticed that my monthly website visits had shot through the roof, especially on days when I posted something new on my blog. Prior to this, I maybe got 25 visitors a day.

Now, on a day when I drop some hot juicy content, such as my post entitled, “My Book on the Signers of the Declaration of Independence is $2.99 This Weekend!” or “Here is a Photo of Some Blueberries I Just Picked Off a Shrub in My Yard. No, Really!” I’ll log 400 visits in a 24-hour period.

Four hundred visits, from four hundred different IP addresses.

Let me cut to the chase here with a statement that may strike my SleuthSayers audience—you folks, who absolutely love me to pieces—as nutty, batty, and possibly dotty: I, Joe D’Agnese, am not that interesting.

Scrapey, scrapey, scrape, says the little red flag.

I mean, seriously. What the qokedydy is going on here?

There is no reason 400 individual, breathing humans on the planet would be interested in my publisher’s $2.99 weekend ebook sale or my sweet, juicy berries. Or, for that matter, photos of my dog wearing a bowtie, or my occasional announcements of articles appearing here on SleuthSayers.

Then I noticed that many of these visits were coming from one place in the world: China. Some days, my only visitors are from China. Currently, China is my No. 1 visiting nation with 1,778 visits in the last month. The USA, where I was born and am a citizen, is No. 2, with 615 visits. No way to sugar coat this: I am kind of a big deal in China.

I briefly thought about installing a service such as Cloudflare that allow website owners to block traffic on a nation-by-nation basis. What if malicious actors were trying to steal personal information from my website? Yikes! After all, I often do write wacky stories about my forebears.

Then, I did a Zoom chat with that friend of mine who runs an up-and-coming book review site. Relax, he told me, those are just bots scraping your content to train AI on your text.

Whether performed by bots or ancient humans, scraping is disgusting. Compared to this, training AI on pirated works downloaded off crappy free-book websites comes off as the genteel way to steal.

“Here,” my friend said, “lemme show you something.”

He shared his screen and proceeded to show me his Cloudflare. (Not a euphemism, I assure you.) Judging from the line graph I ogled, sometime in 2024, the number of visitors to his site quadrupled, quintupled, sextupled. When he installed Cloudflare and blocked Russia, China, and a bunch of other nations, guess what? The numbers kept climbing. Only this time, the visitors were coming from nations such as Canada, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

Problem fixed? I innocently opined.

“Nah,” he said, “they’re just using VPNs that make it look like they’re coming from ‘safe’ countries.”

My friend chuckles about this these days. He’s resigned to the fact that the more he shares excellent English prose in the form of book reviews, the more it will be greedily scraped by legions of bots who are feeding an insatiable desire to build machines that will replace us all and wreak havoc around the planet.

A contact at a national lab tells me that due to U.S. budget cuts, he and his superiors have had to lay off tons of older scientists studying the mitigation of climate change. In their place, they have hired newer, younger, less expensive engineers who know (something) about halting the influx of AI-inserted malicious code that they are discovering in their critical government systems.

Everyday, my engineer friend says he is pulling his hair out, muttering to the heavens, “Okytarl zexirami šol‑drih!”

Because he has never seen anything so terrifying. His last job was a cakewalk compared to this. And he led a medical supply firm during COVID.

I have begun to think that AI is a thing no one asked for (except cheapskates) and a growing problem no one knows how to solve. Pick your metaphor: A genie let out of a bottle. A new Pandora’s box.

I read a special AI issue of Wired magazine cover-to-cover. One thing I learned in those pages has stuck with me:

Wildlife biologists had trained an AI to mimic sounds uttered by marine mammals. They were quite certain the AI was communicating with said cetaceans but the program was incapable of explaining to humans what they were all gabbing about.

Dolphin: If I eat another minnow, I am, like, totally going to barf.

Bot: Have you considered human flesh?

That magazine hit newsstands in 2023, so far back in time that Sam Altman actually acquiesced to a cover photo shoot. Since then, I have read a metric shedy-ton more, as I am sure you have. When the “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton left his job at Google in order to warn the world of the dangers of AI, I was appalled that no journalist had bothered to ask him the critical question: “Why are you so qokedy scared?”

I finally found the answer in a MIT Technology Review article:

As their name suggests, large language models are made from massive neural networks with vast numbers of connections. But they are tiny compared with the brain. “Our brains have 100 trillion connections,” says Hinton. “Large language models have up to half a trillion, a trillion at most. Yet GPT-4 knows hundreds of times more than any one person does. So maybe it’s actually got a much better learning algorithm than us.”

Oh, you might be tempted to say, so it just works fast. I knew that already, bro

But that too was back in 2023, when Hinton could be written off as an academic who didn’t quite fit the Silicon Valley mold. That was the year one of my British software developer friends wrote me a delightful screed in which he posited that Hinton was, ahem, “a bit of a dick.”

Then Hinton went and won the Nobel Prize, which meant more people wanted to talk to him. In podcast interview after podcast interview (here and here) Hinton reiterated that AI intelligence may cause harm in two different ways: humans will exploit it to bad ends (that’s already happening) or AI will grow so intelligent it will pursue its own goals and ignore the fact that it is unwittingly annihilating us. Other thinkers such as Eliezer Yudkowsky have made the same assertion.

To show you what a quozexirami I am, I listened to all three of these interviews twice, and for weeks after I hid under the covers. Then, by chance, I re-read an old post by writer Josh Stallings over at the 7 Criminal Minds blog.

You guys know Josh? He’s a good egg, or so his prose leads me to believe. He’s also smart. We don’t need no stinking robots to come kill us, he says in this post. We’re doing a good job of killing ourselves—and each other—on our own.

Despite this wisdom, Hinton’s words haunted me for a long time. In one of those three podcasts I linked to above—I think it’s the one with Jon Stewart—Hinton opined that the U.S. was currently ahead in the realm of AI but malicious actors on the world stage would eventually gain the upper hand.

Why? Stewart asked.

Well, Hinton said, what else can you expect if you defund scientific research?

Yes! Yes! I screamed into my phone. And don’t forget all those malicious international bots being exquisitely trained on my muscular, lean, deathless prose!

One day I visited a website that I use to distribute some of my stories. You know how this works, don’t you? Your story is picked as a finalist for some award. You make the story available free online so readers who are likely to vote can read it for free. Over the years I have shared all my Derringer finalists this way, typically using a service called BookFunnel, which distributes PDFs and ebooks. Imagine my surprise when I learn that years after I offered these stories on my blog, on LinkedIn, or on this very website, those stories were being downloaded, sometimes to the tune of 30 or 40 a month. I got suspicious. I immediately searched all the posts and articles—on my site and elsewhere where I’d made these offers, and deleted the links. I also deleted the original file from BF’s library. (I should have done this when the offer period ended, but I was busy crafting exquisitely deathless prose, see above.)

Guess what?

After I deleted the links, and deleted the file, one of those stories is still being downloaded, despite the fact that the site’s friendly customer service reps insist that this isn’t possible.

Word to the wise: If you are about to share a finalist short story in this fashion, my current advice is to delete that pdf or ePub file when the awards are announced. Hopefully this will happen in so quick a timeframe that they won’t have found it.

I dunno, maybe we should stop caring who scrapes our work? At least the machines are feasting on a banquet of excellence. Admitting this means that we have now reached the “It Is Futile to Resist” stage. As science fiction writer Hugh Howey wrote ages ago, any writing you protect during your lifetime will inevitably train the bots when it enters the public domain. So why fight?

Howey is an interesting thinker. He says he believes that AI does indeed promise great things for humanity. Advances in science and education. Hinton believes the same. But...

In one of his recent posts, Howey explains reasons why AI will not reach its potential. After years of rapid development, the pace of stellar gains is slowing. Investors are wary. And it all is beginning to feel like a giant bubble after all. (Before I get sangfroid all over myself, I recommend you read the post for yourself, and watch the video he shares if you have the time.) I worry that am misquoting him.

Moreover, he adds, it does not matter how many excellent ideas our AI agents dream up…for world peace, for a cancer-free world, for the ethnical advancement of technology, or superb ways to reverse climate disaster. The programs will spell out exactly what we should do, but we will ignore it. We will still manage to botch the qokeedy out of it.

The fault, dear BrutusX10, is not in the bots, but in ourselves.

It’s enough to make me splutter and…qopchedy qokedydy qokoloky qokeedy qokedy shedy…

Oh. About that: Back in 1912, a book dealer “bought” a mysterious book from an Italian library written in a supposed secret code. Known today as the Voynich Manuscript, it resides at the Beinecke Library at Yale. For more than a century codebreakers have tried to unlock its secret language, and failed. (I ghost-wrote a book with a computer scientist who was convinced the Voynich was a hoax concocted by a 15^th-century con man to bilk Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II out of a fortune. My colleague’s theory is hotly debated.)

The Voynich remains an example of a supposedly unbreakable code. If it is a real code, and we ever learn to decode it, goes the theory, we might be able to design and make super-powerful computer security passwords even more qopchedian. Possibly the most impregnable, qopchedian codes the universe has ever seen.

Voynichese apparently conforms to the stylistic structure of real language, but it is not English. And these days, I am thinking seriously of publishing a ceaseless stream of blog posts on my website written only in Voynichese. Let the machines drive themselves crazy with Renaissance nonsense. Will it stop the people and things ripping me off? No, but it will make me feel like the most qokolokydyne short story writer the world has ever known. Have a frabjous day.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

— Joe

josephdagnese.com

How Presidents Talk

My father, the Big Band man, had a record in his collection that I heard quite a bit growing up. His 1971 album featured three pieces by the composer Aaron Copland, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra: Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring, and Lincoln Portrait.

Lincoln Portrait is a fifteen-minute, music and spoken-word piece that is, as of this writing, eighty-four years old. Tradition calls for actors and other individuals of prominence to read the 400-word text. The recording I heard was performed by the actor Henry Fonda, who played the president in Young Mr. Lincoln and who subsequently ruined all other narrators for me. When I recently queued up Lincoln Portrait read by Darth Vader James Earl Jones on my phone, I expected great things. But no—Jones was too over the top. I think I caught him enunciating a comma.

Copland composed Portrait in 1942 when asked by the Russian-American composer Andre Kostelanetz to create a work that would celebrate a prominent American. World War II was on, and creative people of all types were being pressed into service to create art that would keep American minds on task. Copland suggested Whitman, but Jerome Kern had already picked Twain. Kostelanetz suggested Copland choose someone else—a statesman, not a writer. “[A]ny personality that is to be expressed with music should have some kind of humane aspect,” Copland would later tell an interviewer, “which is precisely what attracted me to Lincoln.”

As a subject, Lincoln was the perfect figure for that time, and always. Composers well before Copland had penned musical tributes to the gangly lawyer from Springfield. From the early part of the 20th century politicians of every stripe trotted him out, regardless of their persuasion. Progressives, leftists, radicals, Republicans and Democrats alike. FDR invoked him, suggesting that the Great Emancipator would have embraced the New Deal.

Copland had seen people suffer during the Depression; he was drawn to the plight of workers and the ideology of Communism, of all things, which would haunt his career after the war. But he, like others, believed Lincoln spoke for the common man (sans fanfare), the downtrodden, the masses. The words he selected from Lincoln’s writing hammered home principles that everyone who lived on the continent in that era had presumably agreed to embrace: freedom and democracy.

The historian Pauline Maier, in her book, American Scripture, discusses this at length. Lincoln’s genius was taking a forgotten document written in 1776 and linking it to a troubled moment in the mid 1800s, enshrining it as the nation’s critical founding document. The Constitution was the law of the land, but the Declaration was gospel. Lincoln had a flair for making political language sound sacrosanct.

In my thirties, I had a coach who loved smashing icons. He hated Democrats mostly, but for a born-and-bred Kentuckian he took strange aim at Lincoln. “You know,” he said once during a break in our sparring, “there is no evidence that he ever read a book.”

Bullshit, I thought then, and I stand by that today. Even before I knew about the sources he had drawn upon for his famous Cooper Union speech in 1860, it was obvious to me that Lincoln had read at least one tome: the King James Bible. Parallelism...chiasmus...he was all over it.

Copland incorporated five Lincoln texts in his Portrait. I’ve heard the piece so many times that I can practically quote them from memory. This week I went back and looked at the originals, in part to see what Copland left out.

In the selections that follow, I am bolding the lines Copland used. Copland did not preserve Lincoln’s underlines, which historians usually render as italics. The narrators of Lincoln Portrait are always given latitude to speak the lines as they see fit. The italics show which words Lincoln probably stressed.

Here’s the first, taken from the Annual Message to Congress, dated December 1, 1862, about a month before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation:

“Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”

You don’t have to go far, even in this selection, to see that its writer has wholly mastered that Biblical tone. When he uses an adverb, he makes it work. Words are not repeated unless they do double duty.

“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose…”

“In giving freedom…we assure freedom…”

He could have ended the graf with “and God must bless forever,” but then it would not so nicely echo “will forever applaud.” Ask yourself: is it a politician who has commanded our attention—or a preacher?

“fiery trial…”

“Plain, peaceful, generous, just…”

“Will light us down…”

Gotta admit, Coach: this is damn fine writing from a fellow who never cracked a book. We should all be so illiterate.

Copland’s second quote is taken from earlier in this very same message to Congress:

“The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

I love this:

“quiet past…stormy present…”

“….is new, think anew, act anew.”

I have always liked the use of the word disenthrall in this sentence, but I needed to research what historians think he was really saying. They read it as tearing ourselves away from a system that we know is no longer working.

Copland’s third textual choice comes from the final debate with Stephen Douglas (October 15, 1858), in which Lincoln framed their senate race—as so many have—as a battle between good and evil, right and wrong. His oft-quoted “a house divided cannot stand” from this speech is paraphrased from the book of Matthew. But that’s not what Copland chose to quote. He went straight for the graf that would find favor with modern listeners:

“It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

Earlier that year, Lincoln had made the same point, with similar phraseology, in another speech. Only then, instead of referring to this paradigm as "the same tyrannical principle," he dubbed it "the same old serpent."

A while back I learned that when Apple’s founder Steve Jobs was drafting a speech, for weeks he would tap out and shoot short emails to himself with a flurry of sentences and ideas that occurred to him. Lincoln did the same: he grabbed a sheet of paper and wrote short notes to himself. The three-line scrap that follows was found among his personal effects. He never inserted it into a speech, and his secretaries were unable to shed much light on their origin or intended use. Copland works it in as his third quote. And by now, coming after the tyrannical principle line above, two underlined words take on enlarged meanings. Again, these are Lincoln’s italics.

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

Copland ends with the final 71 words of the Gettysburg address. I’ll spare you the lines. You can probably hear them in your soul.

Of the people, by the people, for the people.

He spoke those words on a battlefield after a far more famous orator intoned his way through a two-hour speech. Lincoln rose, spoke for two minutes, and later confided to friends that he had utterly botched it. “It is a flat failure,” he told his bodyguard.

Well, sure: what can we expect from such a bookless wonder?

During the Portrait’s premieres in 1942, Kostelanetz observed that the piece was received differently depending on the news of the day. When newspapers were filled with news of American victories abroad, thunderous applause. When the news was somber, audiences left hushed, perhaps struck by the long road ahead and the work democracy demands of us. And for a few years after World War II, Copland endured his own fiery trials at the hands of McCarthy.

And yes, I suppose I understand what Coach was getting at…maybe. Lincoln was no saint. Go back and read some of the fourth debate with Douglas. For the first half of the speech, he’s playing African Americans for laughs, bending over backward to reassure his audience that he doesn’t really think a black person will ever be the equal of a white person. Once he gets them on his side, he hammers home that if he had his druthers, he would change this one little thing about American life. But it’s an ugly windup.

But then, at Gettysburg, he again rescued that one word, equal, from a document many of his colleagues had either forgotten, maligned, or had willfully misremembered, insisting that we regard this dirty, five-letter word as the prime directive of the American experiment. One can see why historians find it hard to disenthrall themselves from his words and actions, even today. They probably never will.

A while back, when she spoke at the Abraham Lincoln Association in Springfield, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told her audience:

“It’s not just that he was a great president, that he won the war, ended slavery, and saved the Union. It was his kindness, his sensitivity, his empathy, his willingness to let those past resentments go. I had the feeling that he had the normal human emotions of envy and anger and jealousy, but somehow he would say, ‘You have to damp them down because they’ll fester if you allow them inside. They’ll poison you.’”

She spoke those words in 2018. She was describing an imperfect human being who was, if nothing else, a well-read, mature adult. Even in 2018, the thought of a president who actively worked to shun resentment must have seemed quaint to her audience of Lincoln admirers in Springfield.

Each year around this time I am reminded that the US has bundled Lincoln and Washington's birthdays (February 12th and 22nd, respectively) into one collective Presidents' Day. I understand the reasons for this choice, but just as Copland declined to compose a piece about Washington, thinking him too stiff and formal, I am drawn still to the rail-splitter.

If nothing else, family lore compels me. On the occasion of her naturalization, I am told, my Italian-born grandmother was asked to name the 16th US President.

"Ling-a-ling," she replied in the accent that she would carry for the rest of her days.

By then, she was a married woman, a homeowner, a taxpayer, and the mother of three (young) American citizens. Her examiner granted her citizenship, or I suppose I would not be writing these words.

My fellow writers, we cannot escape history. A strangely comforting thought that one clings to in dark hours.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Case of the Crumbling Platform

Bow before your lord and master!

image by crstrbrt, licensed from Depositphotos

I never knew my grandfather but I spent nearly sixty years of my life in the company of his son. I am sure that if the elder had lived beyond his forties, he would have spent his last days riffing on the same theme junior did: “The world is crap, and getting worse.”

This is commonly regarded as a thing older people say. And if you wrote such a character, you would redraft him or her, or bend over backwards not to have that fictional being come off like a stereotype.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow, who writes tech articles, bestselling wonky nonfiction and delightful science fiction, we now have a word that nails the moment we’re living in: enshittification. When he coined the word in 2022, Doctorow—a longtime Internet policy wonk—used it to describe what he saw as the gradual if inevitable worsening of Internet-based platforms.

But the word took on a life of its own. American and Australian lexicographers in 2023 and 2024, respectively, named it their word of the year. And when Doctorow published a book on the topic in late 2025, he applied the word broadly to a variety of industries well beyond the web. Why is this happening? He explains:

“[T]he digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into, and computers we put into our bodies. And these computers suck.”

I admit that the chief pleasure I took from this book was realizing a) No, I am not going crazy, and b) I am not turning into my progenitors.

Doctorow describes the process deftly. In its first stages, a company dreams up a great idea and bestows it on the world. The thing works so easily and often satisfies a need people didn’t know they had:

• Google gave us a search engine that was better than, say, Altavista or Ask Jeeves.
• Amazon gave us a frictionless shopping experience with superb customer service.
• Facebook gave us a free way to stay in touch with far-flung friends and relatives.

In Stage I, Doctorow says, these services give themselves wholeheartedly to their users. The firms work hard to attract, please, and keep users. They become indispensable to peoples’ lives. The only platform of their kind worth using.

As soon as they demolish the competition and achieve a monopoly…as soon users feel that they simply cannot live without the service they provide…the firms flip the switch. The end user is no longer king—advertisers are. (In the world of Amazon, the “advertisers” are small or large businesses who have chosen to sell their wares on the platform.)

Companies advertise on these platforms, and when they do, the ads perform insanely well. So well, in fact, that small and big firms alike hire staffs to manage, say, their growing FB ad empire. It doesn’t matter that this is a field of advertising that has existed for three minutes on the Geologic Time Scale. It’s so easy to find customers that you have to be an idiot not to sell via Google, FB, and Amazon ads.

About a decade ago, I met and chatted up a self-published mystery writer who swore by Google Ads. He loved the platform because as ugly as those boxy ads were in the early days, they were easy to craft, fairly inexpensive to run, and they resulted in sales of his fly-fishing mystery series. What’s not to love? Finding new readers was as easy as, ahem, shooting fish in a barrel.

Then, just when advertisers feel that they simply cannot live without this advertising source, the platform embarks upon Stage III: Corporate profits and shareholders are the only thing that matters. End users and advertisers can go pound sand. A single tweak, and ads stop working overnight. Advertisers must spend and spend and spend to figure out how to attract customers with the new algorithm. 

As an end user, you know what Stage III enshittification feels like. We’re living in it.

FB users have no idea what’s up with their friends and family because they have to wade through so many ads to see the posts they came for in the first place. You are told that you must pay up if you want anyone to actually see what you have posted.

Amazon buyers can’t figure out which products are cheap, popular, or highly rated (depending on their preferences) because every search they do presents ads for products only tangentially related to the thing they’re looking for.

I’ll let a friend who runs a website aimed at book lovers describe what the current Google environment has done to his business:

“Google has given up on its search engine, stuffed it with even more ads, and shifted to ranking only the largest websites ahead of independent publications. We are better off than most independent websites because of our size, but we have lost 70% of our traffic from Google. And given Google’s monopoly, that is a huge hit. This is affecting every website you can imagine, and one recent report found that 400 independent news publications have lost 50%+ of their traffic from Google. Google is no longer helping people find good content and has destroyed how the web works.”

He notes that the AI-generated answers at the top of Google’s search are “scraped” from the content of other creators, who have no recourse given Google’s power. Some creators are fighting back in lawsuits, but seriously, how likely is it that they will prevail against a behemoth? He, like many creators, is shifting to designing a dedicated app so he can attract and cater directly to his clientele.

Doctorow explains why Google has intentionally enshittified its search engine. The current model forces users to search a second, third, or fourth time, tweaking search terms each time. By design, as users spend more time in Google’s environment, they are obliged to view more ads and gobble up more of advertisers’ precious budgets.

Of course FB, Google, and the ’Zon aren’t the only offenders out there. I have focused on these three because so many of us know what they are like. Doctorow’s book pivots from giants like Apple and Twitter to a slate of other corporations. 

In these pages, I learned…

• why Amazon drivers are so miserable and drive so recklessly. They are on such tight delivery schedules, and spied upon by cameras in their vans, that they barely have time to stop and use a restroom. (I’ll spare you the humiliating details of how they manage to relieve themselves.) “For a man with a dick-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos sure has an abiding hatred of our kidneys,” Doctorow quips.
• that the private contractors in China that manufacture Apple phones have installed netting under their high-rise windows to halt worker suicides.
• about car manufacturers who now insist that in order to “unlock” the premium features of your new vehicle, you must pay a monthly subscription fee to access features you enjoyed “for free” when you bought your last car.

This last example illustrates Doctorow’s opening thesis that digital circuitry allows firms to control a product long after it leaves the factory, and long after you supposedly “bought” it. It’s why Hewlett Packard knows when your printer has run out of ink, or how they can program your printer to die when it’s time to have you buy a new one. It is why supermarkets that use digital price tags on their shelves can raise or lower prices on a whim, not unlike Uber’s “surge” pricing. (Such an easy way to raise prices on staples like milk, water, and toilet paper minutes after weather forecasters announce the possibility of a big winter storm!)

Digital price tags look like this.

By now, perhaps you are wondering why you would ever want to read this book. I assure you that there is hope: when Adobe, the design software giant, thought they could steal their subscribers’ work to train AI, designers switched to rival software in such numbers that Adobe backed down. A similar fracas ensued when Unity, a provider of software used by millions of independent digital game developers worldwide to create 3D video effects, demanded a royalty each time these designers’ games—which Unity did not create—was downloaded by the end user. Game designers rebelled, and Unity’s board booted the executives who had created such an embarrassing public spectacle for the firm. Doctorow assures us that, at least in Europe, legislators are fighting monopolies that lead inevitably to such outrageous expressions of capitalism. (US legislators pioneered such laws, but apparently cannot be bothered to enforce them.) Lastly, Doctorow notes with some glee that underground software designers are hard at work creating freeware to circumvent how ’Zon tracks its drivers.

By the time these anecdotes arrive, at the end of the book, each comeuppance feels like sweet, sweet karma. They are a reminder that the digital products, the underlying mechanisms, are not the problem. It’s the cynical human profit motive that perverts them. 

While reading Enshittification, I was reminded of the time I ran into a sales clerk taking a smoke break outside her place of employment, the local Best Buy, the US’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer of consumer electronics.

I introduced myself and reminded her that she was the person who had helped us pick out the washer, dryer, and range we bought when we first moved into our new house.

She puffed away and smiled. “How are they holding up?”

Fine, I said, but why did she ask?

“Used to be, you’d buy one of those things and they’d last forever. I knew when they started rolling out washing machines with… motherboards that they wouldn’t last. Fridges too. We never got claims on the old ones.” She paused. “Did you get the extended warranty, hon?”

* * *

See you in three weeks!

— Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Stranger on the Other Line

I know it is late in the season, but I have one more Christmas story for you, which I present on the grounds that we are comfortably within the 12 Days.* Buried within this story is a message all writers can take to heart in the New Year.

The weekly newspaper appeared at our house one day bearing the details for an unusual call for short fiction. They wanted holiday stories—Christmas, Hanukkah, what-have-you—with only two stipulations. Submissions had to be a maximum of 300 words, and authors could not be older than 18 years of age. Payment would be exactly zero dollars, and all the copies young contributors could swipe out of the weekly advertiser’s boxes around town.

The year was 1980. I had just hit age 16 in the fall. I wanted to place a story in this paper badly. My ego demanded it. I had been submitting stories to EQMM and AHMM to no avail. It did not matter that this newspaper mostly reported on volleyball scores, town council news, and the openings of new hair salons. I needed the win.

My parents had bought me a used manual Olivetti ages ago. I rolled a sheet of paper in it, hunched over the damn thing, and paused.

I considered the competition. My gut told me that I was probably at the high end of the submission age group. It would be my story against a slew of little kids. I probably had the technical advantage but not if I gave the editors the same old thing.

What were they going to write, these mindless, Santa-loving weenies? I just knew. Mostly likely, they would write the sort of two-beat holiday story I hated: kid wants much-beloved gift, kid gets much-beloved gift—happy holiday, yay.**

My story had to be anti-that. Was it possible to write a Christmas story that celebrated no presents? Was such a thing possible? I didn’t know, but I had to try. It might set my work apart from everything else the editors might be seeing.

I ended up with a story that described harried grownups and kids queued at a store. Everyone is cranky, miserable, exhausted—until someone smiles and says something that lightens the mood. Whatever they said—and gee, I sure wish I could remember what it was—was just the injection of magic these people needed. Suddenly, the humans started humaning again and All Was Well in Holidayland. Ta-da. The End.***

I boiled that thing hard. Had to, to stay under 300 words. What kind of monsters were these editors? Didn’t they know 300 words was barely enough words for exposition? I was crafting art here.

I mailed the story. And waited. No response.

The paper always pubbed Wednesdays, which just happened to fall on Christmas Eve Day that year. When the paper showed up on my parents’ doorstep, I flipped through it anxiously until I found an interior double truck devoted to tons of holiday stories by local kids. Leading them all, at the top of the left column, was my story. It was the longest of the bunch.

At the bottom, my name, town, and age were printed in bold.

Holy smokes! My first byline in print.

I badgered my Mom to drive me to get more copies. Considering the ambitious menu she had on tap that day, it’s a wonder she didn’t kill me. Rather than drive around town looking for the freebie newspaper boxes, she cut to the chase by driving straight to the newspaper’s offices a few towns over. We knew it well; it was located next to our favorite Chinese restaurant.

Hours passed. My father returned from the city a little early that day. He was upstairs sorting mail. Downstairs, my mother was assembling one of those multi-course Italian American fish feasts that was our Christmas Eve ritual. The house smelled perfect, looked perfect, and I felt…awesome.

Then the phone rang. My father summoned me to take the call.

“Who is it?”

“I dunno,” he said, covering the mouthpiece. “Don’t stay on long. We gotta eat.”

I pressed the phone to my ear, and said hello.

“Joseph?”

I was expecting to hear the voice of a friend or family member. But no. The person on the other end was a grown-up and a stranger. Yes, I said. That was me.

“Joseph,” she said. “That was a very…good…story you wrote.”

It was a woman. An older woman. And she’d been crying. I could tell. She sounded choked up right now.

“Um, thanks,” I said. “Who is this? Is this Mrs.—”

And here I inserted the name of a family friend whose voice this person’s resembled.

“No,” she said.

“Then who?”

“You did a very good job with the story, Joseph. You have a Merry Christmas, okay?”

She hung up. Leaving me with a fresh mystery and not a lot of clues. My father, the only other witness to this person’s voice, was more interested in getting to the bottom of the minutes-away shrimp scampi than debating the identity of the caller.

What a world it was once! Strangers called your home, asked to speak to one of your teens, and you handed the phone over to said kid without asking questions. If you pulled that stunt today, they would revoke your dad license.

I dawdled that night over the shrimp, calamari, baccalà, tuna and spaghetti because my head was occupied with questions that could not be settled with food. Also, I was probably stuffed.

What had just happened? Was this the sort of thing that occurred when you printed a story? Was it going to keep happening? If this person wasn’t a friend of my parents, then who was she? Had she really been crying? If so, why? Did my story make her cry?

Back then, I was incapable of answering any of those questions. I would never know anything more about her than I’ve just told you.

My grown-up writer brain certainly likes to speculate. It starts by reminding me that the holidays are a difficult time for many people. There was nothing terribly special about my story. For all we know, this sad woman phoned dozens of kids that day, and wasn’t it nice that the newspaper made it so easy for her to locate us all in the phone book?

Here’s what grown-up writer Joe can tell you that kid Joe would not have been able to express. If we are lucky, yes, at the end of every story of ours there is a reader. A human impacted by our words.

I know opinions on this differ, but I write to please myself first, editors second, readers third. If I’m doing a capable job, there’s a chance I’ll make all three of us happy, but I can’t predict a damn thing. How anyone will respond to your finished work is a deeply personal, practically unknowable, thing, and it’s not worth your time worrying about it.

Yes, if editors routinely pass on your work, by all means write more, work harder, and learn more about the craft. But it’s wise not to get too attached to outcomes when drafting. You want to lose yourself in the world you’ve created.

But this I know. Stories are tools for touching other people’s hearts. They are emotion transmission machines, made by one person for another. That’s a fine lesson for a kid to learn at the beginning of his writer journey. And a handy one for any writer to recall at the beginning of another year.

I wish you all a beautiful, productive 2026, and I will be phoning you all shortly to relay these sentiments, though I will probably wait till after dinner.

* * * 

* The Twelfth Night marks the day when a heavenly host appeared to shepherds in London proclaiming the coming of Sherlock Holmes.

** This is precisely the plot of the beloved movie, A Christmas Story. Shows you how much I know about writing a good Christmas story.

*** Clips of that story were lost in one of my various moves over the years, but I remember the plot.

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Mysteries of the Magi

A writer woke one winter morning in his apartment south of Gramercy Park, in New York City, and remembered that he had promised to deliver a short story to an editor that very day. He sat and composed a 2,000-word story in three hours. Needless to say, the story was perfect. The editor ran it exactly as written!

No—wait. I have it on good authority that what really happened is the editor sent one of the newspaper’s illustrators trudging through the snow to bang on the writer’s apartment door, bug him about getting his story turned in, and elicit some glimmer of an art concept. Admitting the idea was still hazy, the writer instructed the illustrator to draw a young couple standing by the window of their furnished flat—and sent him on his way.

Oh. Sorry, folks. I’m glancing at my notes now, and it seems the writer didn’t write the story in his apartment at 55 Irving Place, but a few doors down in the second booth of Pete’s Tavern. And he was three sheets to the wind when he wrote it!

Who knows how short stories spring to life? How many writers meticulously document their process, beat-by-beat, when they could be working on the piece instead, getting it submitted, and getting paid? In the absence of a solid record, if the story becomes famous, legends of its writing pop up and kick truth to the corner.

Guests who stay at the O. Henry Hotel in Greensboro, NC, find this paperback in their room, which they are welcome to take home.

All we really know is, this particular story appeared in print on December 10, 1905. The newspaper was The New York Sunday World. The story, then dubbed “Gifts of the Magi,” was retitled when it appeared in the author’s 1906 collection, The Four Million. Today, it’s regarded as O. Henry’s finest, but I doubt he ever saw saw it that way. Why would he? When William Sydney Porter died five years later, at age 47, “Magi” was just one of the 600 stories he wrote in his lifetime. And he wrote it for Joseph Pulitzer’s World, which is the newspaper that invented yellow journalism. Porter probably never envisioned that the piece would be performed on stage and screen by human actors, Mickey Mouse, and Muppets alike.

What Porter (1862-1910) thought of the story, the creative decisions he made while writing it, are lost to history, though numerous books share sweet anecdotes about its writing, like the ones I mentioned above. I love the last graf of the story, and never tire of rereading it. But there is a genuine mystery embedded in the first graf of the story. Let’s all play detective, and see if we can spot it:

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

You spotted it, didn’t you? If Porter took pains to spell out that sixty cents of Della’s money is in the form of pennies, then what coins made up the remaining one dollar and twenty-seven cents?

When I was editor of a children’s math magazine, I briefly thought of posing this question in an article, until I realized that in order for this to work as a solid classroom activity, I would need to print O. Henry’s entire story, and take pains to spell out for kids and teachers all the story’s nuances. For example, I myself first heard the story read aloud by my fifth grade teacher. Afterward, I remember him stopping to explain, “You see, she sold her hair. To make wigs.” He probably also explained that pocket watches needed a fob, lest they go missing. I suspect that these sorts of historical facts need to be explained to adults, even today. I never ran that article; it would run too long for our desired length.

But I digress. Let’s take a look at the math. Quick note for readers beyond America’s shores: US currency is largely unchanged since 1905, when Porter wrote the story. Until last month, Americans could settle their debts with paper currency, quarters (25 cents), dimes (10 cents), nickels (5 cents), and pennies. Dollar and half-dollar coins would have also been plentiful in 1905, but today are mostly relegated to collectible sets issued by the US mint. Pennies were popular in 1905, but died an ignominious death on November 12, 2025. They will remain in circulation for the foreseeable future.

So, on the face of it—or shall I say obverse?—Della could have had one dollar (in coin or paper currency) and a quarter, but that means she would have needed another sixty-two, not sixty cents in pennies.

If we look earlier than 1905, we find that the US Mint did issue a two-cent coin, and that coin could easily solve our problem. Della could have a paper dollar, a quarter, a two-cent coin, and sixty pennies. But the two-cent coin was minted between 1864 and 1872, and many online wags insist it is too much of a stretch that Porter would write a story that relied on the existence of a coin that went out of service when he was ten years old. The US mint did issue a three-cent coin that could also easily resolve the question: 9 x 3-cents = 27 cents. But the last three-cent coins were struck in 1889, sixteen years before “Magi” was written. Still, that number of years sounds more reasonable than arguing for the two-cent piece.

Another wrinkle to iron out: As we writers know, just because Porter wrote his story in 1905 does not necessarily mean he was claiming that the events of the story were set in 1905. Personally, I don’t think this applies in this case. O. Henry was not a practitioner of historical fiction...mostly. His pieces typically appeared in newspapers printed for working-class readers of his day. Read today, fish wrappers tomorrow. Throughout “Magi,” he quotes figures that readers would have recognized as authentic and appropriate for their time. Della’s husband Jim earns $20 a week, the couple pays $8 a week for their furnished apartment, Della sells her hair for $20 and uses the money to buy Jim a platinum watch fob. That precious metal became popular in US jewelry design in the early 1900s, supporting the argument that the story takes place in the 20th and not the 19th century.

But here is my biggest argument for accepting the two- or three-cent coin “solution.” As a kid growing up in the US in the 1970s, I remember finding coins in pocket change that were minted in the 1930s. Occasionally we’d find “Indian head” pennies, which were last minted in 1909. So, in my own lifetime, I was accustomed to finding coins that were close to seventy years old without much effort. (One of my brothers collected coins, so we were really looking.) I know without asking that many of you fine readers and scribes have had the same experience. Americans used to routinely find Canadian, Mexican, Irish, and UK coinage in their pockets. I’ll bet citizens of those four nations had similar experiences with US coinage. 

Who’s to say Porter didn’t see the same thing in his day with supposedly extinct American coinage?

If you refuse to accept vintage two- and three-cent coins as solutions to the “Magi” mystery, then the only acceptable theory is that Porter picked figures that emphasized Della’s poverty without bothering to see if the math worked. Artistically speaking, one dollar and eighty-seven cents sounds better than one dollar and eighty-five cents. Telling us that sixty cents of it is in pennies illustrates the point of the paragraph, that Della is literally saving one penny at a time.

But I struggle with the notion that he did not care, for what I think is a good reason.

You may recall that Porter did time for embezzlement. Money went missing when he worked as a bank teller in Texas. He fled to Honduras to escape prosecution, returning only when his first wife was dying of tuberculosis. After she died, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in an Ohio federal prison.

Turns out, standards were so sloppy at that bank that everyone—from the execs down to the tellers and clerks—“borrowed” from the till as if it were a petty cash cigar box, intending to repay it...eventually. Shockingly, the only person who ever got busted for the missing money was the person who called attention to the bank’s lax practices: Porter. A psychologist who interviewed him in prison in Ohio said that he had never encountered a more embarrassed inmate. Porter’s only child did not learn of her father’s criminal past until after his death.

Considering his record, does Porter sound like a writer who would dash off a few lines concerning money without checking to see if the math worked?

Regardless, “The Gift of the Magi” remains a charming story, infused with all the self-sacrifice that love implies. Why not leave it at that? At this point in my ruminations I told myself that I needed to move on so I could contemplate more important literary inconsistencies such as Dr. Watson’s middle name, his number of spouses, and in which limb he carried back that shrapnel from the war in Afghanistan.

If there’s a postscript here, it’s the fact that I left my house one recent morning and paid a visit on Porter and his family.

He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, you see. His second wife hailed from a town not far from my house. Their marriage lasted four minutes, and he skedaddled back to New York.

He died shortly after, of diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, and various complications. His ex, who was also a writer, lived well into her nineties, and spent the ensuing decades regaling reporters with stories of “Will’s” time in Asheville. She even wrote a novel about a couple in love, and quoted from his love letters to her. 

“He was a citizen of asphalt,” Sarah Coleman Porter shared in a newspaper column in 1921. For a while, she said, Will rented an office in downtown Asheville. But he never got a lick of work done, preferring to hang out an upstairs window, watching people pass by. After his death, she acknowledged in letters to friends that his health was ruined, and if the couple had just had a little money saved up, he might have been able to rest and rebuild his health. He tried to stoke his strength by venturing on manly hunting trips in the local mountains, but that really did not work.

She quoted him as saying:

“I could look at these mountains a hundred years and not get inspiration—they depress me. A walk down Sixth Avenue—a face glimpsed—a snatch of conversation was heard and I have my story.”

The weather was cloudy and cold the day I visited. I have lived in the Asheville area 20 years but have never been before now. The cemetery is built on hilly ground, its roads narrow and lacking guardrails. Workers are still repairing damage visited upon trees and headstones by Tropical Storm Helene last autumn. I drove through twice, passing Thomas Wolfe’s final resting place, looking for a solid place to park that would not send my car tumbling into a ravine. Porter is buried beside Sarah, and mere feet from his daughter.

Two ironies leapt out at me. Perfect, I thought, for the man who was famous for his masterful twist endings. 

Ironic fact No. 1: The writer’s grave faces the road and looks out eternally over those mountains—not Broadway, Sixth Avenue, or the Bowery.

Ironic fact No. 2: I need not have worried my pretty little head over Della’s pennies. O. Henry’s grave is strewn with them! So many, I might add, that some have spilled off the stone and now litter the dormant grass. 

Tourists apparently leave them in honor of the man and his most famous tale, which says everything about the power of a good story and the wisdom of small gifts.

Happy holidays.

* * * 

Some resources:

Virtual tour of the O. Henry house in Texas.

Audio version of “Magi.”

Next time you are in NYC, you really must try the twenty-dollar O. Henry Chicken Wings.

See you in three weeks!

Joe 

josephdagnese.com

The Footnote That Roared

I. THE EDITRESS

In 1828 the United States was 52 years old. The last living signer of the Declaration of Independence was in his nineties. Native Americans occupied vast tracts of the continent. Slavery was yet a scourge on the national character. The network of US railroads was its infancy. The west was wilder. Pioneers had yet to take their wagon trains west. Americans had not yet developed an insatiable taste for beef, which was good, because it was still too hard to transport beeves* to market. Americans couldn’t identify a cowboy because they wouldn’t have recognized that word. Morse Code and Time Zones hadn’t yet been invented. When you stepped off a stagecoach, steam boat, or packet boat in a new city, you had truly entered a new place and time.

The only thing that bound one American to another was a common language, a pair of holidays (Washington’s birthday and the Fourth of July), and the written word. There were a ton of newspapers and magazines. Political speeches and educational lectures were a form of entertainment. When a stranger landed in town, they were greeted first with suspicion and later valued for what news they brought of other places they’d been.

In 1828, a well-educated New Hampshire poet and novelist named Sarah Josepha Hale agreed to edit a lady’s magazine based in Boston. She would have loved to just write her own books and poetry, but her attorney husband had died suddenly, leaving her the sole support for the couple’s five children.

At the age of 40 Hale agreed to become the “editress”—her word—of the Ladies’ Magazine. When this magazine was later acquired by an enterprising publisher, Hale moved from Boston to Philadelphia—the epicenter of American publishing—to helm the larger, better-known Godey’s Lady’s Book. By the 1840s, the magazine had a circulation of 70,000—which was huge, even today. Under her guidance, the magazine’s circulation grew to 150,000, its peak.

The largest-circulation, most powerful voice in the nation was a magazine aimed at women.

The word editress conjures up images of mousy dames but Hale was no shrinking violet. She had stepped into the role she would play for the rest of her life, until she retired from the magazine business at the age of 89.

She was a tastemaker. A crusader. A cultural architect. She was, if you can picture it, Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart at a time when there were no women celebrity media moguls. She cultivated and paid for the work of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Washington Irving. I am cherry-picking names modern readers would recognize. She published many other less-known writers who were able to support themselves financially on their writing. A first in American history.

All the women (and occasional men) in America who picked up her magazine were schooled by the various ideas she gently put forth. Hale spoke from the ink-stained pulpit of the American printing press.

Depending on your perspective, she was conservative…or just careful. She pooh-poohed the idea that women should have the vote, and she danced the tarantella around the slavery issue. She knew that other female editors had lost subscribers for taking abolitionist stances. Hale needed this job badly, so she walked a fine line that offended few.

She wrote a poem called “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which became the first text any American who plays music learns. Hale urged women to wear white on their wedding day. When Buckingham Palace erected a conifer indoors for the first time at Christmas, Hale urged her American readers to do the same. All three of these cultural markers are with us still.

When fundraising efforts for a proposed Bunker Hill monument stalled, she offered her services to the men supervising the effort. The gentlemen of Boston scoffed at the little lady. She asked her readers to send a few pennies to aid the effort. When readers sent in $3,000, hardly enough to finish the monument, Hale announced that she and her like-minded lady friends would organize a craft and bake sale in Boston.

The gentlemen tittered. 

When she raised $30,000 in seven days, the gentlemen choked on their brandy and cigars. The success of her effort attracted the interest of deep-pocketed donors, who chipped in, raising the amount to $50,000, about $1.8 million today. Needless to say, the gentlemen of Boston were delighted to accept the money.

When the home of George Washington had become too much of a burden for his heirs, she urged her readers once again to chip in so Mount Vernon might be saved. In a nationwide campaign, she and other magazine editors raised about $200,000 (about $8 million today), and that’s the chief reason you can visit those grounds today. 

II. THE CRUSADE
One crusade stumped Hale. In the 1840s, she wrote Zachary Taylor, the 12th president of the United States. Her request was simple: she wanted him to institute a national holiday called…Thanksgiving.

The holiday had been celebrated in the nation before, usually at the behest of governors in the New England states. States would celebrate it on different days or months. New Hampshire on one day, Maine on another, and Vermont still another.

President Taylor declined. Something about separation of church and state. Hale didn’t understand why she was such a stick in the mud. President Washington had had no such qualms. Back in 1789, he had proclaimed the first national day of Thanksgiving and prayer. Hale’s father had served in the Revolutionary War, and she revered Washington. So much so, she thought Thanksgiving ought to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November because that’s what the great father of the nation had decreed.

Pity Mr. Taylor, not to have glimpsed a future that included giant inflated balloons, back-to-back football games, and doorbuster sales! Refusing to give up, the editress wrote the governors of every state. And governors of American territories. And American ambassadors overseas. Some budged, others didn’t.

Every year, in the pages of Godey’s, she spoke to the nation’s reading women. Thanksgiving ought to happen, she said, here’s how it is done in New England. In those magazines, which you can still find sold online at rare book site, she start talking about Thanksgiving in summer, and kept hammering away on the subject in every issue until autumn. 

Every year in the fall, she treated her readers to recipes appropriate for the day. In Northwood, her first novel, she prescribed a feast so lavish that anyone who attempted it would need a stronger table and a new sideboard to serve the dishes. (Read historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s description of that fictional meal, and her attempt to replicate it.) Three basics modern Americans would recognize were mentioned in Chapter 8 of that novel: turkey, pie, gravy. And more. Oh, so much more.

Thereafter, each president who succeeded Taylor could expect to find a letter from Mrs. Hale in their inbox every year of their term. Millard Fillmore. Franklin Pierce. James Buchanan. They read her letters, and did precisely nothing.

Then one day Hale’s annual letter landed on the desk of Secretary of State William H. Seward, whose hawklike nose smelled opportunity. He brought the letter to his boss with a recommendation.

The nation was mired in a vast national crisis, pitting brother against brother, father against son. In Hale’s proposal Abraham Lincoln must have glimpsed not a mere holiday but a tool for unity, a way to bind a divided nation. In 1863, the same year he traveled to Gettysburg to contemplate aloud this very issue, he proclaimed this American holiday to occur on the last Thursday in November.

Not to be outdone, mayors in southern cities declared their own Thanksgivings, to be celebrated a week before Lincoln’s. Charitable movements sprang to raise money to treat troops in the field to a meal. One Union soldier recorded that his regiment feasted on apples, pies, and coffee on that day, which they also observed as a day of rest. In Michigan, Harriet Tubman went door to door to raise money for a meal for Black Union soldiers stationed in Detroit.

In 1864, Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving again. Jefferson Davis followed suit, choosing a day that fell a week before Lincoln’s holiday. Historians have found notes in soldiers’ diaries marking these occasions. “The enemy observes this as thanksgiving day. All quiet,” wrote one Confederate soldier.

Hale knew that it would ultimately take an act of Congress to establish a federal holiday. She fretted about this point in her letters to presidents. But she wrote them nonetheless. Over the next few decades, after Lincoln’s death, Hale urged each president to make the proclamation. By now they knew to take the advice of the Philadelphia editress. Rutherford B. Hayes was the last to receive a Hale letter. After that her pen fell silent.

You know the rest of this story. The tradition of U.S. presidential proclamations had become so fixed that even after Congress made Thanksgiving a national holiday during FDR’s presidency, presidents always issued a document containing flowery language. Not to do so at this late date would seem un-American.

III. SANS PILGRIMS
There the story ends, except for the curious fact that none of those early presidents, not Washington, not Lincoln, not the New England state governors in the days before Hale took up her cause ever mentioned the Pilgrims. (FDR was the first.)

Hale certainly knew of the Pilgrims. She published poems about them in her magazine. But neither she nor her allies ever associated Thanksgiving with Pilgrims. A slim reference to that 1621 event at Plimouth Plantation had been printed in a book in England, but quickly went out of print and was forgotten.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, Sarah Josepha Hale and her counterparts knew about earlier “thanksgivings” celebrated in North America by Europeans but most likely she and they simply conflated days of religious observance with a tradition of harvest festivals.

Thanksgiving as a practice was known to many cultures in Europe, and native peoples on this continent as well. It’s not exactly a complicated concept—give thanks, express gratitude, repeat as necessary.

For the Europeans, the word was associated with a day of prayer, deep contemplation, humiliation**, and fasting—not feasting. (That’s the way Washington would have thought of it.)

You declared a day of thanksgiving. You singled it out. You denoted that day in your calendar as something special. And on that day, you humbly thanked your god. And let’s face it, sometimes the thing they were humbly thanking the deity for was the destruction of their enemies in battle. Humans gotta human.

In 1844, a Boston clergyman named Alexander Young compiled a book of Pilgrim history and lore. By then, a copy of the long-lost description of the 1621 event had been rediscovered in Philadelphia. Young printed this new-to-him story of the Pilgrims and Indians, and inserted a footnote at the bottom of the page saying, in effect, Gee, I guess this was the first Thanksgiving.

He probably didn’t know of the other North American thanksgiving events that historians accept today: one in 1564 (by French Huguenots in Florida), 1565 (Spaniards; Florida), 1598 (Spaniards; Texas), 1607 (English; Maine), 1610 and 1619 (both English; Virginia). And yes, at these events, the word “thanksgiving” was noted in the record, and some of these events involved feasting with indigenous people. There are probably more. There must be. Gratitude is a universal human instinct.

The older I get, the more I understand just how much humans and Americans in particular crave myth over truth. The simpler the better. If that story quietly reinforces something we’d rather not speak aloud, all the better. When immigrants started arriving in the U.S. in droves in the late 19th century, suddenly magazine editors trotted out the first Thanksgiving myth that had been circulating since Rev. Young’s 1844 footnote, and schools passed it on, unquestioned, to children. The problem with grammar school history is that it is rarely corrected in high school or college. You reach adulthood with primitive childish notions lodged forever in your head. Ask any critical thinking American adult if they buy the Pilgrim story, and they will giggle and say no. But they’re at a loss to tell you what parts of the story are fiction.

Over the years, some U.S. presidents have seen fit to lionize the Pilgrims in their annual proclamations as rugged individualists on a par with pioneers and cowboys. Yeah, they weren’t. Even if you accept that they did something incredible—leave Europe to practice their way of life in a wilderness, the 1621 story has problems, to say the least.

IV: PROBLEMS IN THE RECORD
There’s no evidence the Pilgrims regarded that day as special. In the records we now have access to, they never referred back to that event as a declared day of thanksgiving. They did declare a formal day of thanksgiving in 1623, to thank God for that year’s abundant harvest, so the distinction was known to them.

In 1621, the Wampanoag arrived on the scene after hearing shots fired. The Pilgrims had been hunting for game. Previously, in a treaty, the Wampanoag had agreed to help the Pilgrims if they were ever attacked. The Wampanoag may have arrived in the settlement to honor that pact.

Oh—after that pact was “signed,” Wampanoag men would often visit the English settlement unannounced, bringing their wives and children. The Pilgrims finally sent a delegation to the indigenous people to say, in effect, “Stop coming. Or, if you must, please leave before dinner because we can’t feed you.”

This time, the uninvited guests stayed for three days, and both peoples hunted enough to feed themselves. The Wampanoag party outnumbered the Pilgrims.

Within a year after the meal we regard as the basis of the modern American holiday, the Pilgrims were displaying the head of a native person outside their fort, a warning to all others. Myles Standish killed three native men he suspected were plotting against the colony, and mounted one fellow’s head on a pike.

There’s a ton more, but these few lines should suffice to demonstrate what a problem it is to hang a beloved national holiday on a single occasion that amounts to three sentences—one hundred and twenty words—in the historical record.

Hale didn’t need the Pilgrims to make her holiday happen. Nor did Washington, Lincoln, or any of the others who came before them.

It makes more sense to celebrate in the spirit humans have always given thanks around the planet. Sometimes footnotes should stay footnotes.

* * *

Sources:

Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers… by Alexander Young (Little & Brown, 1844).

Young’s now-famous footnote appears on page 231 of his text.

Proclamations for Thanksgiving… by Franklin B. Hough (Munsell & Rowland, 1858).

The First Thanksgiving by Robert Tracy Mackenzie (InterVarsity Press, 2013).

This Land is Their Land by Robert J. Silverman (Bloomsbury, 2019).

We Gather Together by Denise Kiernan (Dutton, 2020).

Northwood; a tale of New England by Mrs. S. J. Hale (Bowles & Dearborn, 1827).

* I love this word but never get to use it. Enjoy.

** In the parlance of the early republic, humiliation meant to humble oneself before God.

* * *

Happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating next week. I’ll see you in three weeks.

Joe

josephdagnese.com