Because of the family's poverty, he was unable to go to college, but he educated himself as best he could by haphazard but wide and intense reading--as many as five hundred books a year, he says. He began writing while employed in Ottowa by the Canadian census bureau in 1931. His early ambition was to win one of the prizes offered by McFadden's
True Story Magazine, and, in fact, it was not long before he had received a prize of $1,000, an amount equal to his yearly salary as an employee of the census bureau. Despite this reward and his understandable euphoria, he shortly experienced a revulsion of feeling against this type of fiction and turned to a variety of other ways of making a living. Among these was the writing of plays for Canadian radio, for which he received about $10 each--making a total of only $600 for fifty plays, a sum which included bonuses and some resales in the United States.
Perhaps not many persons would have said at this point that he had much of a future as a writer. But in 1938, in McKnight's Drugstore in Winnepeg, he casually picked up the August issue of Astounding Stories (later Astounding Science-Fiction) and read the first half of a novella by Don A.
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