In a career spanning more than seventy-five years, Margaret Cousins has written many short stories, nonfiction articles, biographies, children's books, novels, poems, and inspirational essays, and she has edited thousands of manuscripts in these same genres. As a writer for mass-circulation magazines, she regarded editors for whom she worked as kind, considerate, helpful, patient, and hardworking; as an editor at Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal, and Doubleday, she tried to meet all those standards. Her essays in the Writer, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the Wilson Library Bulletin offered encouragement and clear, practical advice to those who hoped to publish fiction in the popular-magazine market. Nearly two hundred of her own stories and articles were published in United States and foreign magazines. At age eighty-five, looking back over her career in the magazine industry, Cousins recalled: "I wrote what it was my job to buy, and...