“Well, I kept on writing. I bought a second-hand typewriter and worked it with two fingers and many times I thought of the salary I might have had coming in every week. As Mr. Dreiser said, it wasn’t easy. I made $500 that first year. Things came out my way because I stuck to my plan and always kept my eye on the future--and had the courage to refuse that job.”
Not long afterward Mrs. Willsie’s stories began to appear in the magazines and were unusually popular. She took up the writing of special articles for such periodicals as _Harper’s Weekly_ and _Collier’s_ on important subjects--immigration, divorce, Indians, the United States Reclamation Service. Norman Hapgood, who was then editor of _Harper’s Weekly_, said of her work: “She has the ability to get at the essentials of a big question, and put it in simple, human terms.”
Mrs. Willsie’s first published novel was _The Heart of the Desert_, which came out in 1913. It won immediate recognition for her. Richard Le Gallienne, writing an appreciation of Mrs. Willsie in the _Book News Monthly_ of March, 1917, said:
“As a boy, of course, I adored the American Indian of Fenimore Cooper, but, since then, words fail. If I have a bête noire in fiction, nowadays, it is the American Indian. I mention this purely personal peculiarity, merely to emphasize the delight which I took in Mrs. Willsie’s hero in _The Heart of the Desert_--and his truly heroic wooing and winning of a white girl, with Mrs. Willsie’s, and, I am sure, all her readers’ concurrence. Never was such a masterful wooing, or one brought to winning through such heart-beating suspense, such a grim passionate race for love and life in so wild and star-lit and infinite a setting.”
And he says that therefore “when I say that, in my opinion, _The Heart of the Desert_ is one of the best ‘yarns,’ and, if I may say so, one of the most virile love stories written in our time, it is not from any prejudice in favor of its subject matter.”
Mr. Le Gallienne’s article is not long. We take the liberty to quote the rest of it from a booklet on Mrs. Willsie prepared by the Frederick A. Stokes Company, her publishers. This booklet also contains an interesting article by Hildegarde Hawthorne on Mrs. Willsie and her novels. Says Mr. Le Gallienne: