Love Story was one of the most successful pulp magazines, and Bacon was frequently interviewed about her role and her opinions of modern romance.
Street & Smith gave Bacon other magazines to edit: Ainslee's in the mid-1930s and Pocket Love in the late 1930s; neither lasted until 1940.
Romantic Range and Love Story ceased publication in 1947, but in 1948, she became the editor of both The Shadow and Doc Savage, two of Street & Smith's hero pulps.
Elmer died of Bright's disease on January 1, 1900, and Jessie moved to her family's farm in Barcelona, New York, on Lake Erie on the outskirts of Westfield.
She was briefly a photographer's model, before taking a job at the Harry Livingston Auction Company, which sold unclaimed luggage left at hotels by guests.
[6] In the early 1920s, Bacon sold two articles to The Saturday Evening Post: one about her work at the auction company, and a ghost-written account of the life of a chambermaid in a New York hotel, titled "On the Fourteenth Floor".
[15] Bacon found she had to adapt her usual soft-spoken and rather genteel speech to be successful in some of her working relationships at Street & Smith: "well-bred tones did not spell authority to them", she later recalled, but "after I learned to talk to them in language which I had heard my grandfather's stable boys use, everything was fine".
[19] A common stereotype in romance fiction was a poor girl with rich relatives who cruelly mistreated her; Bacon argued that "anyone who thinks that only those people who do not have to work for a living have the capacity for making other people's lives miserable has just never spent an hour inside of the average factory, hotel, school, or department store or around almost any office.
Douglas Hilliker, an artist who drew interior illustrations and later painted magazine cover art, lodged with Bacon and her mother and half-sister for a while in 1930, along with his wife and daughter.
The project had to be abandoned when Schalk's manuscripts were accidentally destroyed and Bacon's correspondence files were lost in an office move.
[33] Bacon became aware that there was a glass ceiling in effect for women at Street & Smith, and that there was a limit to how high she could progress in the company.
[34] In late 1936 an article of hers titled "Women Among Men" appeared in an early issue of The New York Woman; it was published anonymously, presumably because she was concerned about how Street & Smith's management would react to it.
[39] The death of George Campbell Smith, Jr., in April 1937 led a year later to the arrival of Allen L. Grammer, from Curtis Publishing, to manage the company.
Grammer brought several of his staff with him, and quickly began making sweeping changes to improve the efficiency of Street & Smith's business.
[43] On romance in mid-twentieth century America, she commented in 1941 that "It is better for girls to acquire careers first, husbands afterward," and "financial independence for the wife is an ideal basis for marriage.
[43][note 2] Street & Smith published annual anthologies of stories from their magazines, and in the early 1940s Bacon and Ford were given responsibility for producing these.
All-Fiction Stories drew its contents from all Street & Smith's fiction magazines, and there were also specialized titles, though these did not necessarily appear each year.
[49] In late 1946 Grammer decided to cease publication of both Romantic Range and Love Story;[49] the last issue of each appeared in January and February 1947, respectively.
These were both hero pulps, meaning that they carried a lead novel in every issue about the same character, whose name gave each magazine its title.
[51] Bacon converted both magazines from digest size to their original larger pulp format,[52] and later claimed that this had immediately led to a 25 percent increase in circulation for The Shadow.
[51] She told Walter Gibson, who wrote the lead novels for The Shadow, not to change his approach to the fiction, but asked Lester Dent, the lead writer for Doc Savage, to return to the adventure format mixed with science fiction elements that had characterized the early issues of the magazine.
The Millers were part of the Algonquin Round Table social group, but it was Alice who was the successful writer; Henry became a stockbroker, funded by his wife's money.
Powers suggests that her long poem Forsaking All Others (1931) is a veiled reference to her own marriage: the protagonist has an affair with a younger woman, but refuses to leave his wife for her.
[62] Bacon's occasional problems with depression surfaced at times when she was at Botts, and Powers suggests that this might have been because the place reminded her of Alice's existence.
[34] Bacon's relationship with Miller was beginning to show signs of fraying by the late 1930s,[65] and she also felt under pressure because of the change in management at Street & Smith in 1938.
[68] Bacon was initially happy in retirement; she bought a house in Port Washington, on Long Island, and planned to write a novel, "a scandalous tell-all" about publishing, to be titled Love Story Diary.
[71] In 1963 Bacon started an imprint, Gemini Books, to reprint it, this time under the title Love Story Editor.
[73][75] In 2016 the Baxter Estates Village Hall in Port Washington held an exhibit about Bacon, including her desk, photographs, manuscripts, and typewriter.