In a 1929 interview with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dashiell Hammett described his first attempts at “breadwinning.” After dropping out of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute at 14, he worked as a messenger boy for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the…

  Between 1908 and her death, in 1946, Gertrude Stein created over a hundred prose portraits, which she called “word paintings.” Most of her portraits were of her friends: Alice B. Toklas, Matisse, Picasso, Sherwood Anderson, Erik Satie, Hemin…

  In 1938, Marie Armstrong Essipoff, a journalist, editor, and memoirist, was helping Theodore Dreiser research murders committed by women. She had been collecting newspaper clippings on “misspent lives,” and she sent a letter to Dreiser highl…