the fiction market was simply drying up

"Back in 1953, at any rate, the fiction market was simply drying up, as more and more middle-class readers turned to television for entertainment, while many of the slicks had either reduced or stopped running fiction altogether--an irreversible trend. At the end of that torturous but productive year, [Charles] Jackson had sold a single story (for all of $250) and yet remained philosophical to an almost heedless degree: 'It isn't only that the fiction market grows less and less,' he wrote Brackett; 'the failure was entirely in me, I think. I didn't do [the stories] quite wholeheartedly . . . and I think the reason was partly financial but even more, because my real love is the novel."

~~ from Blake Bailey's Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of                                           Charles Jackson