[...] In the face of this he decided to abandon writing novels. In 1934 he began writing for The New Yorker, mainly “casuals” and Talk of the Town pieces. Soon this undemanding writing also palled; he felt it did not provide him with the opportunity for “accomplishment” that fiction had offered. He later reflected that he “missed the struggle that had accompanied [novel writing]—the hope, as long as I had it—the possibility—that the accomplishment might be large. In my New Yorker work I saw no such possibility. Others in the offices around me, were writing masterpieces—Thurber and Perelman were comic geniuses. I knew that my writing for the magazine was not up to theirs,” and he added disarmingly that “easily though it came it didn’t improve when I tried harder.”