which he, Hecht, had invented ... and that wasn't all, either....
Gentlemen, he just couldn't stand it.

Well, the old job was open.

Ben shuddered. It wasn't the old job that he was thinking about. He had a
new idea. Something different. Maybe impossible.

And here followed specifications for "One Thousand and One Afternoons."
The title, I believe, came later, along with details like the salary. Hang
the salary! I doubt if Ben even heard the figure that was named. He merely
said "Uh-huh!" and proceeded to embellish his dream--his dream of a
department more brilliant, more artistic, truer (I think he said truer),
broader and better than anything in the American press; a literary
thriller, a knock-out ... and so on.

So much for the mercenary spirit in which "One Thousand and One
Afternoons" was conceived.

A week or so later Ben came in again, bringing actual manuscript for eight
or ten stories. He was haggard but very happy. It was clear that he had
sat up nights with those stories. He thumbed them over as though he hated
to let them go. They were the first fruits of his Big Idea--the idea that
just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often
flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there
dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but
walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers,
sunning itself in parks and boulevards. He was going to be its
interpreter. His was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors,
his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death. It was no