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My First Literary Venture
Journalism in Tennessee
Nicodemus Dodge – Printer
Mr. Bloke’s Item
How I Edited an Agricultural Paper
The Killing of Julius Cæsar “Localized”
I was told by the physician that a Southern climate would improve my health, and so I went down to Tennessee and got a berth on the Morning-Glory and Johnson County Warwhoop as associate editor. When I went on duty I found the chief editor sitting tilted back in a three-legged chair with his feet on a pine table. There was another pine table in the room and another afflicted chair, and both were half buried under newspapers and scraps and sheets of manuscript. There was a wooden box of sand, sprinkled with cigar-stubs and “old soldiers,” and a stove with a door hanging by its upper hinge. The chief editor had a long-tailed black cloth frock-coat on, and white linen pants. His boots were small and neatly blacked. He wore a ruffled shirt, a large seal ring, a standing collar of obsolete pattern, and a checkered neckerchief with the ends hanging down. Date of costume about 1848. He was smoking a cigar, and trying to think of a word, and in pawing his hair he had rumpled his locks a good deal. He was scowling fearfully, and I judged that he was concocting a particularly knotty editorial. He told me to take the exchanges and skim through them and write up the “Spirit of the Tennessee Press,” condensing into the article all of their contents that seemed of interest.
I wrote as follows:
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I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations till its mother wouldn’t have known it if it had had one. It now read as follows:
“Now that is the way to write – peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods.”
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