He wrote a guide to writing newspaper humor, The Gentle Art of Columning: A Treatise on Comic Journalism (1920), and an autobiography, The Great American Ass (1926).
Edson's career suffered after he published his autobiography, which included an extensive personal attack on Franklin P. Adams, a New York colleague.
[6] Edson and Sandburg exchanged letters, sharing an enthusiasm for the ideas of Elbert Hubbard, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and socialism.
Edson left but regularly returned to his farm there over the next decade, observing the customs, attitudes, and speech patterns of his rural neighbors, which formed the basis for much of his later writing.
Edson joined a staff that included columnist Franklin P. Adams, muckraking journalist Zoe Beckley, illustrator Rube Goldberg, sports writer Grantland Rice,[15] and drama critic Brock Pemberton.
He focused mostly on Greenwich Village, covering local and visiting artists and writers including Ray Stannard Baker, Albert Boni, Guido Bruno, Max Eastman, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Harry Kemp, Alfred Kreymborg, Amy Lowell, Neysa McMein, Alla Nazimova, and Mary Pickford.
Edson was critical of the bohemians living in Greenwich Village, especially Guido Bruno, "the Barnum of Bohemia," who turned his Washington Square garret into a tourist attraction and was receiving financial backing from the wife and son of the owner of the Morning Telegraph.
[18] In 1917 Edson moved to Aurora, Illinois to work as editor of the monthly magazine for Mooseheart, a home for disadvantaged children recently opened by James J. Davis, the Director General of the Loyal Order of Moose.
[2] After the success of his first book, Edson moved to Charleston, South Carolina with the intention of giving up newspaper work to write serious literature.
He also sold a feature called “Tongue Twisters” to the Adams Newspaper Syndicate and wrote the six-volume Edson Pocket Library.
The book was published as The Great American Ass by Anonymous, with the idea that curiosity about the identity of the author would stimulate sales.
The book catalogs the pretentious and petty tendencies of the narrator's Puritan ancestors, focusing on his father as the main villain.
Despite mostly negative reviews, The Great American Ass generated enough sales to reach the New York Tribune's nonfiction best seller list.
[24] Time described it as the “freakish self-history” of a man "with passionate grievances, Tom o' Bedlam's honesty and a spilling store of acrid Americana to relate… The father looms as a monument of malicious, brooding egotism…"[25] On the other hand, O. O. McIntyre called it “…as honest a book as ever written,”[26] and Harold Trump Mason, owner of the avant-garde Centaur Press, sent a copy to D. H.
[27] Edson left Charleston for New York in 1927 in an attempt to revive his career, but his recent publishing failure and long absence from the city undermined his efforts.
[31] In 1963, a reporter for the Kansas City Star found Edson living on a government relief check in a Topeka railroader's hotel slated for demolition.
[32] The reporter wrote a feature on Edson, presenting him as a once-famous columnist now facing eviction and an uncertain future.