The Prose Factory: literary life in England since 1918D. J. TAYLOR Why would anyone wish to be a professional author? Increasingly ill-rewarded, living precariously, battling to keep his or her head above water in an era of flickering iPhone and tablet screens showing ransacked intellectual property, the freelance scribbler faces an uncertain future and a rocky present. But the glamour of authorship persists. D. J. Taylor shows how little has changed since George Gissing evoked the world of the struggling writer in his 1891 novel, New Grub Street. For a brief period after 1918, before film and TV began to seduce popular audiences away from the text, writers like Arnold Bennett earned considerable income (and Taylor is never less than well briefed on the cash sums involved) from books and