[10] He moved from nuts-and-bolts journalism to the arts, contributing material to the campus literary magazine, The Lit, and penning two librettos for the illustrious Princeton Triangle Club, although both were rejected.

[1] He also read translations of Russian classics by Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, which deeply impressed Poole for their realistic style and aroused what would become a lifelong interest in him in the authors' native land.

[1] Pushed by the Child Labor Committee to seek publicity by rewriting some of his lurid anecdotes of the life of street urchins, Poole wrote an article that early in 1903 found its way into the fledgling muckraking magazine, McClure's.

[13] Poole retreated to writing short works of investigative journalism on the boys of the city streets and met with better success, seeing print for one piece in Collier's and two others in the New York Evening Post.

[15] He met and made friends with Abraham Cahan, publisher of the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward (Der Forverts) and gained an appreciation from the venerable revolutionary of the struggle being waged by oppressed Jews and others against the Tsarist autocracy in Russia.

[16] The tipping point for the 23-year old Poole as a settlement worker came when he was selected to investigate the problem of tuberculosis in New York City's Lower East Side tenement slums.

[22] The job put him in touch with the young Upton Sinclair, who was on the scene to do research for what he hoped would become the "Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Labor Movement," published in 1906 as The Jungle.

"[25] Together with an interpreter and a stenographer, Poole sat for eight hours listening to Breshkovskaya's personal story and the history of the revolutionary movement fighting for the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty of Imperial Russia.

[27] Poole sailed for England, then proceeded to France before traveling by train to Berlin and on to Russia, bringing with him communications and money entrusted to him in Paris for underground Russian constitutionalists.

[29] After his return from Russia, Poole continued to produce feature short stories depicting urban working class life for the periodical press, all the while gathering anecdotes for future novels.

[32] His first effort, revolving around life in a steel mill, failed to find a producer but his second, a drama about the construction of a bridge in the Rocky Mountains, led to six weeks of rehearsals and a grand New York opening — followed by poor reviews and a quick close.

[31] Poole was also among those left wing intellectuals who helped to found the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS), joining in the task with his friends Arthur Bullard and Charles Edward Russell.

[38] Physically and emotionally drained by the writing process, Poole spent two months in Europe before returning to the family's new home in the White Mountains of New Hampshire to begin work on his next book.

[40] He was ultimately able, however, to persuade The Saturday Evening Post to send him to the German capital of Berlin to cover the war from the opposite camp, and early in November 1914 he sailed aboard a British ship for Europe.

[31] Finally published in 1915, Poole's The Harbor was well received by critics and the reading public and his place in the American literary scene was thereby firmly established.

[31] In 1917 The Saturday Evening Post dispatched Poole to Russia to report on the Russian Revolution,[31] where he joined other sympathetic American commentators such as John "Jack" Reed and Louise Bryant.