Vanity Fair and accumulating countless rejections in two months. When a position as press agent for Broadway producer William A. Brady was offered, Benchley accepted it, against the advice of many of his peers. This experience was a poor one, as Brady was extremely difficult to work for. Benchley resigned to become a publicity director for the federal government's Aircraft Board at the beginning of 1918. His experience there was not much better, and when an opportunity was offered to return to the Tribune under new editorial management, Benchley took it. At the Tribune, Benchley, along with new editor Ernest Gruening, was in charge of a twelve-page pictorial supplement titled the Tribune Graphic. The two were given a good deal of freedom, but Benchley's coverage of the war and focus on African-American regiments as well as provocative pictorials about lynching in the southern United States earned him and Gruening scrutiny from management. Amid accusations that both were pro-German (the United States was fighting Germany at the time), Benchley tendered his resignation in a terse letter, citing the lack of "rational proof that Dr. Gruening was guilty of...charges made against him..." and management's attempts to "smirch the character and the newspaper career of the first man in three years who has been able to make the Tribune look like a newspaper." Benchley was forced to take a publicity position with the Liberty Loan program, and he continued to freelance until Collier's contacted him with an associate editor position. Benchley took this offer to Vanity Fair to see if they would match it, as he felt Vanity Fair was the better magazine, and Vanity Fair offered him the position of managing editor. He accepted and began work there in 1919. An often overlooked influence upon Benchley's early professional career was the admiration and friendship of the Canadian economist, academic, and humorist Dr. Stephen Leacock. From Toronto Leacock closely followed the increasing body of Benchley's published humor and wit, and opened correspondence between them. He admitted to occasional borrowing of a Benchley topic for his own reflection and writings. Eventually, he began lobbying gently for Benchley to compile his columns into book form, and, in 1921, was delighted when the result of his nagging - Of All Things - was published. The British edition of the book carried a Leacock introduction, and Benchley, for his part – in a tribute to Leacock –