The link between literature and hard cash is insufficiently appreciated by critics. Why, for example, are the novels of Alexandre Dumas filled with terse, interrogative dialogue? Because the author of The Count of Monte Cristo was less interested in the aesthetic effect produced by this treatment than in the fact that he was being paid per line. Certainly Dumas’ shade seemed to hover over Writing for a Living (3 December) in which, before a live audience at McNally Jackson’s New York bookshop, Elizabeth Wurtzel reflected on the pre-history of her celebrated best-seller Prozac Nation (1994).The book, a fine old chronicle of Harvard students living it up and then blotting it out, began life as an unpublishable 20,000-word magazine article, and was, naturally, considered “s