Read "The Making of a Novelist" by David Christie Murray online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Thousands of people remember the excitement created five or six years ago by the story of the Missing Journalist. Scores still cherish the memory of poor MacNeill and think of him as amongst the cheeriest, friendliest, and most helpful of men. He was a delightful fellow and a good fellow; but he had a certain boisterous exaggeration of manner which sometimes made his friends laugh at him. So far as I know, he neither had nor deserved an enemy through all his effusive, genial, and blameless life.
He burst into the Savage Club one day when I happened to be there alone. He was unusually radiant and assured, and 'At last, at last,' he said, 'I've got my foot on the neck of this big London! ' The triumphant phrase set me thinking at the moment, and has often recalled to me since, the time when this big London had its foot on me: a thing of the two which I am afraid is the much more likely to happen in the experience of any young aspirant to literary honours when he has neither friends nor money to back him, and no reputation to begin with.