Confessions and Criticisms by Julian Hawthorne

In 1869, when I was about twenty-three years old, I sent a couple of sonnets to the revived Putnam’s Magazine. At that period I had no intention of becoming a professional writer: I was studying civil engineering at the Polytechnic School in Dresden, Saxony. Years before, I had received parental warnings—unnecessary, as I thought—against writing for a living. During the next two years, however, when I was acting as hydrographic engineer in the New York Dock Department, I amused myself by writing a short story, called “Love and Counter-Love,” which was published in Harper’s Weekly, and for which I was paid fifty dollars. “If fifty dollars can be so easily earned,” I thought, “why not go on adding to my income in this way from time to time?” I was aided and abetted in the idea by the late Robert Carter, editor of Appletons’ Journal; and the latter periodical and Harper’s Magazine had the burden, and I the benefit, of the result. When, in 1872, I was abruptly relieved from my duties in the Dock Department, I had the alternative of either taking my family down to Central America to watch me dig a canal, or of attempting to live by my pen. I bought twelve reams of large letter-paper, and began my first work,—”Bressant.”