A college dropout, Burke quit Columbia University in 1918 and settled in Greenwich Village to become a writer (SCBC 5). He took his inspiration from Flaubert, as he wrote in a letter that year a few months before his twenty-first birthday. “I shall get a room,” he writes,

Broom, Secession, The Little Review, S4N, Manuscripts – these experimental “little magazines,” usually short-lived, are among the places where Burke first published stories later collected in WO, which appeared in 1924. In 1916, he had published a poem, “Adam's Song, and Mine,” in Others: a Magazine of the New Verse, which included William Carlos Williams among its associate editors and Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot among the poets it featured during its four years of existence, from 1915 to 1919.

During the 1920s, while his friends Malcolm Cowley and Matthew Josephson expatriated to Paris, Burke became closely associated with The Dial, generally considered the decade's “most important aesthetic journal.”