More than once, he would recall, he was evicted from his room for nonpayment, one time tossed on the street in the middle of a snowstorm. He lived in rooming houses and cheap hotels, dining on crackers and ketchup. He had a hard time of it at first with the Great Depression at its height. Quitting the service to try writing for a living, he came to New York City at 21 with a duffel bag, a banged-up typewriter, and five dollars. He claimed to have written more than 200 stories for the military magazines before ever turning to the outside markets. Navy, and others, and achieved a degree of fame as the favorite homegrown writer of his fellow sailors. He first published his fiction in the navy periodicals Our Navy, U.S. Four years as a “bluejacket” gave him a lifetime of colorful experiences, described for the record as including “brawls in Panama, hot nights in Honolulu, slant-eyed Venuses in Shanghai, and flippant blondes in ‘Frisco.” He wrote his first story aboard a submarine. (1912-1980) Also wrote as: Stephen Gould, Grant LaneĪs Steve Fisher himself would tell it, he was a 16-year-old son of “comparatively wealthy” parents attending a military academy in California when a thwarted love affair with a beautiful Spanish girl (and the spray of shotgun lead from her irate protectors) drove him to run away and join the navy.
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