Following a year on tour, he tried acting in bit parts in Hollywood and a brief stint of free-lance writing, eventually settling temporarily in Chicago as a staff writer for the
Standard American Encyclopedia. In the meantime, he had married Jonquil Stephens, whom he had met while they were both students at the University of Chicago. Leiber made his first professional sale to
Unknown in 1939 with "Two Sought Adventure" (collected in
Two Sought Adventure, 1957), a story in the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series.
In 1941 Leiber, with his wife and son, lived in Los Angeles, where he taught drama and speech at Occidental College for a year. This experience provided much of the background of the academic life for Conjure Wife (1953). He tried full-time writing, but shortly after his first novels had appeared he took a war job as an inspector at Douglas Aircraft. Eventually, he reconciled this choice with his belief in pacifism, but a strain of pacifism still runs through his writing. In 1945 Leiber became a member of the editorial staff of Science Digest in Chicago. He continued to write fiction, as well as editorials and articles, and left Science Digest in 1956 after finding that his work there interfered with his writing.
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