He was accepted to Harvard College, but dropped out after a year in 1921.
Found Success in Advertising
From there Nash held a variety of jobs, none for very long. He worked on Wall Street as a bond salesperson, but admittedly sold only one bond, to his godmother, and instead spent his afternoons in movie theaters. He was a schoolteacher for a year in Rhode Island at his alma mater, St. George's School, and from there was hired as an advertising copywriter for streetcar placards, a job in which he finally discovered his calling. In 1925 he was hired at the publishing house of Doubleday in their marketing department, and did well enough that he eventually moved on to its editorial department as a manuscript reader.
Nash has said that it was the abysmal quality of the manuscripts he read that compelled him to take up the pen himself as a writer. He tried his hand at serious verse in the style of the eighteenth-century Romantic poets, but soon came to realize his own limitations. There were, however, some creative efforts that he was not hesitant to share with others--his scribbled comic verse that he frequently crumpled and lobbed across the office to the desks of colleagues.
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