that--thin as gruel. Nothing else will "sit on his
stomach."

Everything must come to the present-day reader in this
form. If you wish to talk to him about religion, you
must dress it up as a story and label it _Beth-sheba_,
or _The Curse of David_; if you want to improve the
reader's morals, you must write him a little thing in
dialogue called _Mrs. Potiphar Dines Out_. If you wish
to expostulate with him about drink, you must do so
through a narrative called _Red Rum_--short enough and
easy enough for him to read it, without overstraining
his mind, while he drinks cocktails.

But whatever the story is about it has got to deal--in
order to be read by the average reader--with A MAN and
A WOMAN, I put these words in capitals to indicate that
they have got to stick out of the story with the crudity
of a drawing done by a child with a burnt stick. In other
words, the story has got to be snoopopathic. This is a
word derived from the Greek--"snoopo"--or if there never
was a Greek verb snoopo, at least there ought to have
been one--and it means just what it seems to mean. Nine
out of ten short stories written in America are
snoopopathic.

In snoopopathic literature, in order to get its full
effect, the writer generally introduces his characters
simply as "the man" and "the woman." He hates to admit
that they have no names. He opens out with them something