"Through Many Windows was published in 1926. Woodward brought the reader inside a working ad agency, a place of fevered creativity and deadlines, of alternating triumphs and disasters, 'of hurrying and joshing and smoking and swearing.' Copywriters, she said, had the best minds and the sharpest insights of anyone in the business world. In another era they might have become preachers or teachers; now they applied their passions for instructing and converting to products that they themselves might not trust. Woodward recalled her own cynical absorption in the task at hand: the thought of persuading millions of people to buy a can of soup excited her. In preparing the copy she truly believed it the best of all soups. Then, the ad finished and her passion spent, she could not imagine eating the soup herself. Caught in these pulsings of creative frenzy and bleak recognition after the fact, most copywriters not surprisingly burned out by the time they reached forty. They retired, or were kicked upstairs, of started drinking heavily or playing more golf, with plenty of time to reflect on the misuse of their talents. 'In the advertising business we thought ourselves important,' Woodward concluded. 'We thought we knew what we were doing; we had our plans for the next week or next year. The realization came to me with a slow shock that I was nothing, we were nothing.' — The Mirror Makers, Stephen Fox