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❖ 2 ❖ FOUR STEPS TO THE WALL AND HOLLYWOOD DREAMS Antony gave Jon a typewriter and ten dollars, solving the Webbs’ immediate problems. They paid their back rent and bought food to fill their makeshift pantry,a dresser drawer.Jon was able to complete his assignments with the detective magazines and generate income. Even better,Antony gave Louise a job sewing curtains for his interior decorating business. With this, the Webbs had a steady income for a while, until the damp atmosphere of Antony’s store gave Louise respiratory troubles, forcing her to quit. As important as the money itself was that Jon was happy to know someone in town. Now, if things got terrible again, he at least had someone local to ask for help. Jon and Louise welcomed Antony’s dinner invitation for the following Monday night. The food would be better than anything they had recently eaten, and it was good to socialize. Antony’s other guests included writers Jon admired, including local novelist E. P. O’Donnell. A few days after the dinner at Antony’s home, the Webbs were exploring the area surrounding Jackson Square. Louise, used to the wide streets and more open spaces of Cleveland and the Midwest, was frightened by the close, narrow lanes and unfamiliar architecture of the Quarter. As luck would have it, they came upon O’Donnell and a young woman sitting on a grassy mound near the Mississippi River. O’Donnell recognized the Webbs and asked if they would like to sit down. It was the beginning of their first real friendships in New Orleans. Edwin Patrick O’Donnell was “Pat” to his friends, “E. P.” to the many readers of his successful and highly regarded 1936 novel, Green Margins. O’Donnell’s companion was Mary King, an attractive dark-haired Texan with a pretty smile. King was O’Donnell’s girlfriend and also a writer in the making. The two couples fell into conversation and discovered mutual affinities . Before the evening was through, O’Donnell and King had offered the Webbs their patio as a place to stay if they found themselves in need. 23 ❖ Four Steps to the Wall and Hollywood Dreams ❖ Pat O’Donnell, the son of a railroad man, was born in New Orleans in 1895 and lived there most of his life. A fourth-grade dropout, O’Donnell was an ambulance driver during World War I and also served with the adjutant general’s office. He later worked his way from the assembly line to head of publicity for the New Orleans Ford Motor Company plant. Like Jon, Pat was a literary late bloomer, and the two men shared a benefactor. O’Donnell decided to become a writer at the urging of Sherwood Anderson, whom he met while touring Anderson through the Ford plant.Anderson was so taken with O’Donnell’s vivid descriptions of the ins and outs of the factory that he suggested O’Donnell try his hand at writing. In an odd twist of fate, O’Donnell won the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship in 1936, the year that Anderson had backed Jon’s entry. O’Donnell published his first creative work in 1929. “Transfusion” appeared in the first issue of Charles Henri Ford’s ambitious little magazine, Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms. O’Donnell borrowed formal contrivance from the drama, with setting information, dialogue without description ,and a curtain call,though the entire sketch is barely five hundred words long. Blues was a good place to publish. Based in Ford’s small hometown of Columbus, Mississippi, the magazine attracted work from Gertrude Stein, Erskine Caldwell,Paul Bowles,and William Carlos Williams.Walter Lowenfels had a long poem mocking consumerism, “Antipodes,” in the first issue. Regardless of this illustrious company, Blues, like most little magazines, paid its contributors only the prestige of being published. O’Donnell’s first commercial success came two years later when Collier’s published his story “Manhood.” In 1935, Harper’s published “Jesus Knew,” which brought him to the attention of editors at Houghton Mifflin and put him in line for their fellowship, with its one-thousand-dollar prize. After O’Donnell won, he used fifty dollars of that money to buy a one-room shack in Boothville, Louisiana, a small town ninety miles south of New Orleans where he lived and wrote for a time. A year later, Houghton Mifflin published Green Margins to good reviews and strong sales; the book was also a selection of the...

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