congratulate you. It's art, Peter, It's art, Peter, art!" ("Well, it wasn't, you know", Mr. Kyne confided. "They had made the most awful sentimental bunk out of it, all sob stuff.")

"Come now", said Mr. Kyne to the melted but content representative of the bourgeoisie. "What do you know about art?"

"I know all about art, Peter", was the reply, as with a stout finger the gentleman indicated the central portion of his abdomen. "When a thing gets me here, Peter, it's art."

"If he'd been a little more highbrow he'd have gestured to his heart but he wasn't far from right", said Peter B. Kyne.

Like most other members of the "six figure" group of writers, Mr. Kyne did not spring full armored into fiction, but had stirrings of imaginative impulses as a lad. He was born in California in 1880, of farmer stock, with the chores and the delights of a farmer's boy. In the small country school taught by his cousin, now principal of a large school on the west coast, spelling was more important than in these days of advanced education; spelling bees were still in vogue. But the exercise which appealed most to young Peter was the using of all the spelling words of the week to form a "composition" on Fridays. Peter, one week, had asked if he might write his in the form of a story, and had received an affirmative reply. gave his imagination full sweep. It chanced that the visiting member of the county school board arrived. Would he stay to hear the compositions read? He would. Small Peter was filled with anticipatory thrills. He was sent home on horseback for that was how the farmer boys went to school in those days - to fetch a hot dinner for the educational dignitary. This he carried back precariously but success

He

fully; and the worthy gentleman, content after a comforting meal, listened to a score of childish flights. When Peter had finished reading he called him forward solemnly. "Peter," he said, "whatever else you may do in life, if you become a writer, you'll be successful!"

"Strange", said Mr. Kyne, "what a small thing will turn a boy's head in a given direction. The man was probably no prophet; but he was the fire that lit the tinder.'

Farm life was dull for a young man who had visions of adventure and literary prowess. Peter Kyne turned his efforts to business, and finally became clerk in the modest country store, where he worked for twenty dollars a month from 6 A. M. to 8 P. M. Here came the ladies to buy and their husbands to buy, and both to chat. Herwere whispered or shouted all the scane dals of the community, and to Peter came the wily proprietor of the local newspaper with a request for news. This was the aspiring writer's golden opportunity. He seized it, and for no remuneration sent in notes which soon grew into a column. However, the affairs of a small community rapidly lost novelty for a vivid Celtic imagination. War was declared on Spain, and Peter, lying about his age, entered the army at

seventeen.

"It wasn't a question of patriotism", Mr. Kyne explained. "I wasn't foolish enough to think that we couldn't lick Spain without my personal assistance. It was simply an escape.'

However, he admits that his soldiering as a captain of artillery during the late war had nobler motivation.

"The proprietor of the paper had asked me to write him, so I did. He published it with the line, 'From our Special Correspondent'. He also went to my family and secured from them

the letters I wrote two and three times a week to my mother. He published them all."

Then it was that Mr. Kyne first became a circulation builder, for the little paper prospered on the fruits of the youthful soldier's experience. Yet the only tangible result was the boosting of family pride. After the war, a six months' course in business college prepared him for work, first in a wholesale provision house, later in the wholesale lumber and shipping business. It was in the latter that he met the characters which were to give him the material for "Cappy Ricks".

"I don't often write a 'Cappy Ricks' story now, unless I get an idea for a particularly good one", he confided to me. "The old man must certainly be getting on in years. He's served me for a long time!"

Various business efforts, not too successful, culminated in an attempt to function as a lumber broker in California Street, San Francisco. In that venture Mr. Kyne lost everything. After a serious attack of pneumonia he turned to his old ambition and, propped up in bed, wrote a story which he sent to a syndicate starting a morning newspaper in San Francisco. They gave him a job, and he was able to pay the doctors and nurses. Presently he sent a story, "A Little Matter of Salvage", to George Horace Lorimer of "The Saturday Evening Post". Mr. Lorimer liked it, but took the precaution of writing to a friend in San Francisco to find out if the background detail was correct. Assured of Kyne's information and honesty, he paid $250 for it.

"We had paid the office rent, but not the stenographers that week", Mr. Kyne told me. "So when I opened the long envelope and the boys saw the check, they turned it over for me to

sign, went across the street and cashed it, and we paid the young ladies."

He wrote several more stories and sold them. On the strength of that, and of his job as a reporter, he married. Immediately he lost his job. Nothing daunted, he wrote an 8,000 word humorous sea story which he sold for $200 to the "Sunset Magazine". After this he did a series of ten sea stories built around his original characters, and from then on his career as an author was without serious interruption or financial worry.

I had always heard that the first characteristic of Kyne's method was the almost incredible swiftness with which he wrote. Ray Long of "Cosmopolitan" tells a story of the time when he was editing "The Red Book" which corroborates this fact. Kyne, in response to a telegram, arrived in Chicago from a San Francisco train on one of the hottest summer days of a warm year. He demanded a typewriter, sat down, and by six o'clock that night had finished one of his best stories, "Hassayampa Jim". He often writes from six to ten hours at a stretch, occasionally for twelve. In this respect his method is similar to Zane Grey's and different from Joseph Lincoln's. Twice, he says, he has written over 13,000 words in twelve hours, the results being "The Three Godfathers" and "The Go-Getter". Nor in these cases did he rewrite the copy. Not one of his many short stories has taken him more than two days to write, or more than two sessions at the typewriter. His first novel was completed in thirty three days. Although the actual production of a novel may stretch over a period of six or eight months, he considers thirty five days the average amount of actual time he puts on each.

This speed of production is largely due to the fact that Kyne spends so

much time planning his work before he actually sits down at the typewriter a small portable, in the mechanical use of which he is expert. So far, except for a few of his earlier tales, he has never used longhand; but he wants to try it for his next book. As a rule plot is first in the plan, and characters fit themselves around incident. While he composes, incidents and characters often grow and change.

He likes to be absolutely alone when he writes, "so that nothing is with me but those vivid burning characters visualized before me". Sometimes he flees to his ranch, where his chauffeur has a bungalow in which a room is always ready for him. Incidentally, the raising of sheep, hogs, and other live stock is his avocation and chief delight.

As in the case of Mary Roberts Rinehart and many other authors, his original draft is made on cheap, glaring, yellow paper. Kyne says that he does not spare words but uses just as many as he wants. On this first copy he leaves three typewriter spaces between lines.

"Then you do rewrite?" I asked.
"With me, it's deletion rather than

rewriting", he replied. "I seldom add anything, but I cut out a great deal. The main purpose of a first draft is to put in all the material that's in my mind. The corrected copy is just enough of the original to leave a story as vividly and cleanly told as I am able."

Ideas? Mr. Kyne's? They come from everywhere and anywhere. The story behind "The Go-Getter" was a personal experience of William Randolph Hearst's. Mr. Hearst, it seems, had seen a blue vase in an antique store window on a Sunday morning, had wanted to take it with him on a 6:30 train. The vase was presented at the appointed hour; but many the adventures that lay between. It is of the romantic material of everyday life that Mr. Kyne is admirably aware. He lives in a man's world, in which sport and adventure and love hold sway. All these he embraces with a touch that is determinedly and wisely wholesome. He understands the American people as do few others, and he writes of them as they believe themselves to be and in a way which they like. Of him, they can ask no more.

I DON'T know who started it or when

the fashion was set, but certain it is that the beginnings and endings of works of fiction have in recent times been extended to cover more years in the life of the principal characters than was formerly considered necessary. The first adult fiction I read (not prescribed for college entrance examinations) began with the heroine home from boarding school, dealt almost exclusively with her conquests, and ended with her final capitulation in the arms of the most irresistible male.

Then some horrible realist (I believe it was Herrick in "Together" if I may venture a guess), having developed a notion that the conflict which makes a novel only begins at the altar, started the fashion of going on from the capitulation mentioned above through all the hazardous adjustments of early married life, sounding the tinkling brass as well as the clashing cymbals of matrimony. Not much was said about the accompanying children - if there were any save as they affected

their elders and the elders' relations to one another. Things went on this way, one revelation treading on another's woes, until Freud and his fellow psychoanalysts called our novelists' attention to the fact that life's conflicts do not begin at the altar but in the cradle. One must understand all the early influences. One must comprehend the effect upon the unconscious of happenings in the nursery, in order to grasp the true inwardness of the hero's soul and to understand why he must inevi

tably choose a career as a manufacturer of brass tacks or drift into a life of sculpturing tigers at the zoo. And so we begin to find our novelists, persuaded by this newer psychology, not only considering their hero in his infancy but going even further back than the psychoanalysts and probing for us the hereditary influences which may be at work before ever he reaches the cradle.

The Victorian novelists, you may remind me, spent any number of chapters describing the childhood days of their heroes and heroines. True but they did it in a manner quite different from the novelists of the most modern order. They described the home, giving us a sense of the refinement or the squalor infusing it; they described the family's activities and sketched in the background against which the childhood was spent. It was, in short, an objective development of character and description of environment. What we find today is, rather, an inventory of material and spiritual forces likely to influence our hero. Samuel Butler is probably the first novelist of the new order. Professor Phelps in his introduction to "The Way of All Flesh" calls it" a wonderful treatise on the art of how not to bring up children". Did not Butler dare to prick the fatuousness of parents by showing that they are not always gods to their children and that love is not the only or the predominant sentiment bestowed upon elders by their offspring? What iconoclasm, what heresy! Since when,

how have we parents been assailed and flayed for our stupidities, in what we hoped would be light and pleasant reading!

In May Sinclair we find, no doubt, the most thoroughgoing proponent of Freudian principles. Has she not taken "the mother complex" as a theme for two books? When she describes, minutely, the emotions aroused by a prickly beard in the child sitting on the knee of its possessor, we certainly must admit that here observation from without has given way to digging from within. Her books are not only novels; each is "A Life". Though the end of her latest volume, when Arnold Waterlow has almost reached the half century mark, may seem far removed from the beginning chapters when he was a toddler among his mother's crinolines, still one must admit that to understand the calibre of the man whom fate ripped from a chosen pursuit of the classics to the sale of cheeses, the reader must spend one third of the book with him in his childhood and study, with the author, the influences at work molding his character.

It is obvious from a casual survey of our latest novels and plays that one of our chief concerns in life today is what Rabbi Wise calls "the irrepressible conflict" between the generations - - the relation between parents and children and their divergent attitudes toward morals and customs. Where once it was the evils (or the blessings) of divorce which novelists and playwrights chose to discuss, the theme today is as likely to be its result with regard to the children. Where a Balzac or a Thackeray might have desired to show the effect upon a woman's character of indulging in a succession of lovers, what concerns Miss Sedgwick in "The Little French Girl" is the effect upon the woman's daughter and her chances of

making a suitable and happy marriage. It is not the morality of the husband and father that is the subject of paramount importance in such books as Balmer's "The Breath of Scandal" or Webster's "The Innocents"; it is the effect of his behavior upon the lives of his children.

Researches in psychology must inevitably have an appreciable influence upon contemporaneous literature. As psychologists began to discover the differences between the behavior of children and adults, and the effects of early happenings upon later character and career, it was to be expected that our writers would profit by the new light and use it in their work. But they have done more. They are providing a literature of childhood that is growing up side by side with the literature of child training and that is, in many instances, far more illuminating to the parent in search of understanding than the books written by the learned psychologists themselves. And this is as it should be. Are not our litterateurs the interpreters of life, and the psychologists merely the analysts and recorders of facts?

Aside from the galaxy of new novels which discuss the conflict between the older and the younger generations, there is a group of books which deal only with the younger generation, interpreting its moods, aspirations, tragedies and joys to its elders. There is no conflict here, except that which each individual must make to adjust himself to this extraordinary world into which he is born. It is difficult to classify these books. They are not exactly biography, though written in the reminiscent mood; they are not juveniles, though older children might enjoy reading them; they are not precisely essays because there are too many characters in them; nor are they novels