4                                     Don Congdon

To put it simply, to make |i50,ooo he must have sales worth
$500,000. Cash was easier to come by then, in one respect. Pay¬
ments to clients who sold stories to magazines produced more than
fifty percent of an agent's income; slick magazine fiction earned
 

Harold Matson (left) discussing a contract with H. Allen Smith, 1950.

rates of from $500 to $3,000. Somerset Maugham was supposed to
have been paid $5,000 for a story. All the big circulation maga¬
zines ran serials which would bring % 15,000 to $50,000; if a writer
didn't sell fiction at that level, there was a secondary group at the
$150 to $500 range.

Matson's first big serial sale was James Ramsay UUman's novel.
The White Tower, a mountain climbing story whose chief char¬
acters represented countries then at war—Britain, Erance, Ger¬
many and the United States. The Saturday Evening Post bought
it, but, before the novel could be cut into installments, the war
with Germany ended and The Post decided it would be untimely