The manuscript of the book was complete within four weeks. It possessed
me. I wrote night and day. There were times when I went to bed and,
unable to sleep, I would get up at two o'clock or three o'clock in the
morning and write till breakfast time. A couple of hours' walk after
breakfast, and I would write again until nearly two o'clock. Then
luncheon; afterwards a couple of hours in the open air, and I would again
write till eight o'clock in the evening. The world was shut out. I moved
in a dream. The book was begun at Hot Springs, in Virginia, in the annex
to the old Hot Springs Hotel. I could not write in the hotel itself, so I
went to the annex, and in the big building--in the early spring-time--I
worked night and day. There was no one else in the place except the old
negro caretaker and his wife. Four-fifths of the book was written in
three weeks there. Then I went to New York, and at the Lotus Club, where
I had a room, I finished it--but not quite. There were a few pages of the
book to do when I went for my walk in Fifth Avenue one afternoon. I could
not shake the thing off, the last pages demanded to be written.
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