Upon his discharge on February 14, 1919, he relocated to New York City, where he unsuccessfully begged each of the city editors of the seven newspapers for a job. He then turned to a career in advertising, hopeful that it would be lucrative enough to persuade Zelda to marry him. Fitzgerald wrote to Zelda frequently, and by March 1920, he had sent Zelda his mother's ring, and the two had become engaged. Many of Zelda's friends and members of her family were wary of the relationship, as they did not approve of his excessive drinking, and Zelda's Episcopalian family did not like the fact that he was a Catholic. At the time, Fitzgerald was working for the Barron Collier advertising agency, living in a single room at 200 Claremont Avenue in the Morningside Heights neighborhood on Manhattan's west side. Although he received a raise for creating a slogan for a laundry in Iowa: "We keep you clean in Muscatine", Fitzgerald was still relatively poor. Still aspiring to a career in literature, he wrote several short stories and satires in his spare time. Rejected over 120 times, he was only able to sell a single story, for which he was paid $30.