And I believe they were every bit as important as the things that were happening in the laboratories across town at Johns Hopkins Medical School. The American novel, which had fed off the training ground of the short story market, was in the doldrums. The literary future, if you read about it in all the knowledgeable periodicals, looked bleak. But it wasn't. Art isn't a thing, you know.
Art is artists.
It's artists that drive it all, and artists can rarely be permanently silenced. When all of us would-be novelists ended up in journalism, it did change us, just as we had feared. But, inevitably, we also changed it. The newspaper of those days was a gray beast, political and official. There was no news of family, no news of race, no news of science.