He later wrote that these early tales "were constructed according to my own ideas. I caused the fanciful creatures who inhabited the world of fairy-land to act, as far as possible for them to do so, as if they were inhabitants of the real world.... I obliged these creatures to infuse into their extraordinary actions a certain leaven of common sense."
Stockton attended Central High School, a small boys' school. While he was a student there, he won a prize for a short story in a contest sponsored by the Boys' and Girls' Journal. In February 1852 he graduated from Central High and began working as a wood engraver's apprentice. Although Stockton was working as an engraver, he continued to create short stories and began submitting them for publication. In 1855 his first story appeared in the American Courier, A Family Newspaper. Entitled "The Slight Mistake," it is a fast-paced romance concerning a young girl's apparent duplicity and eventual engagement to the story's hero. Four years later his second story, "Kate," was published in the Southern Literary Messenger. Although his writing career was more challenging to him than his work as an engraver, he could not afford to devote his efforts totally to fiction until he was twenty-six years old.
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