UT on the Wea plains, where "a

Ου grain of wheat springs into a

million dollars", in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, George Barr McCutcheon was born. On a farm, too, of parentage partly Scotch, and Scotch by way of Virginia and Kentucky. In these days few books sell as did Mr. McCutcheon's early successes. Three hundred thousand was a good sale, and the famous "Graustark", which he marketed outright for five hundred dollars, has been bound and distributed to the number of a million copies. Nor has his name ever been absent for long from the best seller lists. Last year, with "East of the Setting Sun", another Graustark tale, he was read with delight in thousands of homes.

Mr. McCutcheon is a gentleman of middle age, kindly, fond of golf, temperate, interested in the world at large as well as that of literature. In his New York City apartment, his remarkable library of first editions is his proudest possession. But although he reads those books in their lavish leather cases, he does not fail to keep in touch with current literary happenings, and he may be found several times a week at one or another of the clubs discussing with young and old the books of the season. He enjoys the construction of his romances; yet his favorite among his own works is "Mary Midthorne", a realistic story of Indiana life. It is to this life that he has turned for his newest story, on which he has been at work for many months.

Indiana has produced many writing folk. There Booth Tarkington still has his winter home. There James Whitcomb Riley was born. There George Ade is a gentleman farmer, with vast estates, and Meredith Nicholson indulges in politics and writing. But like most fathers, the elder McCutcheon did not view a career of the pen as entirely satisfactory for his sons. True, he had once himself written a drama of love and intrigue, which was performed by the rural for rural consumption; but this was an act of momentary madness, not a bid for eternal fame. So when George and John took to writing and drawing at an early age, the pater familias was disturbed.

John McCutcheon, the brother, is John T. McCutcheon of Chicago, writer and famous cartoonist. Two more successful brothers it is not easy to find. Yet it was George who was first interested in drawing; in fact, it was George who taught his brother John how to draw. The author of "Graustark" is four years the older. They must have made an interesting pair in those early days on the farm, George doing the chores, and small brother following him around and helping as he could. At eight, George wrote his first romance. It was called "Panther Jim", and it was never finished. Product of an imagination stimulated by yellowbacks smuggled into bedroom and hidden under pillow, it yet had its bearing on future creation. It was the product of the young

mind craving high adventure as it fed on the sight of wide fields and rolling clouds, and listened to the slow drawl of Hoosier folk. It was the first revolt against the drabness of the midwest. It was animated by the same crying out of the soul that was later to produce "Alice Adams" and "Main Street".

The McCutcheon family soon moved to town, to the not-so-small village of Lafayette, Indiana, where the brothers, one ten and the other six, pursued their artistic designs under cover of murky secrecy.

The secrecy added doubtless

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to the enjoyment of creation; for stories written in the cellar by candlelight, with disapproving parents above stairs, are far more thrilling than those indited on the living room table in the midst of an admiring family circle. Approve genius, and it may be stifled; but forbid its progress, and the ultimate result is practically certain. should err were I to give the impression that the brothers McCutcheon were delicate youths of slender calves and rounding shoulders. They played at games with as much vigor as they drew pictures and dreamed novels. They remember shins barked on the lacrosse field, and arms twisted at football. Later at Purdue University they went out for various athletics, and even after George left college he used to go back to play on scrub teams against the regulars. Those were the days of developing western football, of the famous series of Princeton coaches who ventured to Indiana to teach the sons of the plains the tricks that made great and formidable gridiron heroes.

Being a reporter was frowned on by fathers who saw business as the proper career for sons. Yet George Barr McCutcheon's career started much as did Edna Ferber's; he was for a time Purdue correspondent for the Lafayette "Journal". Then he found college

irksome and left, going to work as a reporter at six dollars a week and living on it. Six dollars a week was good pay in those days, and later. The other night, Will Irwin told me that he worked for John O'Hara Cosgrave on "The Wave" in San Francisco for that sum, writing everything from editorials to London society news. While George McCutcheon was still at work in Lafayette, his brother John went to Chicago and got a job on the "Record". At the time, the other George, Ade, was at work too on the Lafayette "Journal". Presently, however, he followed John to Chicago and was engaged as a cub on the same paper. Reputations are made overnight in the newspaper game, and while George McCutcheon was thinking of short stories and making his way toward the city editor's desk, his brother and his friend became famous.

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Yet

George Ade, the new reporter, sat in corner of the Chicago "Record" office one night soon after his arrival. He was long and lean, gaunt of face, and obviously from the country. when word came that a steamer had sunk on Lake Michigan, that lives were being lost and saved, he was the only man there to cover the assignment. The man at the desk had no choice; he sent the cub. The cub wormed his way onto the rescue boat and saw it all. He was the only one of all the city's reporters who did. In the small hours of dawn he came back to his typewriter and pounded out a great story, a scoop story. The next morning over his own signature the "Record" carried it, and everyone asked, "Who is George Ade?" Arrived overnight. It is the old story; but it is George Ade's. The World's Fair found Ade and John T. McCutcheon at work together. Not long after, the "Fables in Slang" came into being, and the great cartoons.

Back in Lafayette, the other McCutcheon's first published works were called "Waddleton Mail". They were letters in dialect written by a gentleman supposedly titled "Mr. William Gunn, Esquire". I read them the other day. They are still amusing, not unlike Ed Streeter's soldier letters to the renowned Mable. The first short story for which Mr. McCutcheon received payment was "The Ante-Mortem Condition of George Ramor". It appeared in Joe Mitchell Chappell's "National Magazine", October, 1896. It was then that the city editor became ambitious to write at greater length. He constructed a full sized romance and sent it to a New York literary agent. It did not find a market. Later, after the success of "Graustark", with a new title, it sold some three hundred thousand copies. It was "Nedra".

When I asked Mr. McCutcheon how he happened to write "Graustark", he found that he could not remember its particular inspiration. "It was the sort of thing people wanted at the time, far flung romance." "The Prisoner of Zenda" had been published, but he had not seen it. Later he attended the play and found it genuinely exciting. "Graustark", published by Stone and Webster in Chicago, was at first a failure. For a time, it looked as if the young author who had accepted payment of five hundred dollars had the best of the bargain; but all of a sudden the novel began to be read, and by its own momentum was carried into many editions. On later reprint editions of it, the author has received royalties, a mark of courtesy and fairness on the part of the publishers, since there is no legal reason for payment. If this had been his "only story", George Barr McCutcheon would probably be a city editor today; but he was more story teller than newspaper man. After he

had turned out another good tale in "Castle Craneycrow", he decided to make a break with regular office hours. His paper, however, preferred to keep him in his old position at half time, and it was not until he moved to Chicago that he decided to give up the daily grind entirely.

The story of the writing of "Brewster's Millions” is an unusual one. He had written "The Sherrods", and it was considered unwise to bring out two novels almost at the same time under one name. Besides, it was an experiment worth trying to see if a story, written by a writer of best sellers, published under another name, could be made a success. It could. It was. Mr. McCutcheon will tell you that "Brewster's Millions" was not an easy book to write. You will remember it as the tale of a young man who is forced to spend a million dollars, without any resulting gain, by a certain date. "I didn't know how to spend a million dollars," says the author, “so my publisher and other friends and I put our heads together and figured it out. I had to have help on the Italian episode because I'd never been to Italy. Then the final climax of the yacht was a rather labored device; but it worked, and there the story was. The publisher sent it out to various great millionaires of the period with a letter asking if they thought it was possible to spend a million in any way. As I remember it, most of them answered in the negative; but the letters were used in what was a very clever campaign of promotion."

Contrary to most popular writers, Mr. McCutcheon says that he actually enjoys writing. "Of course no one likes to work", he adds; "but after I get into a novel, I enjoy seeing it to a finish." Unlike many of the others, he makes only one draft; but it is

founded on a carefully prepared outline. "If a story isn't there in the first place," he says, "what's the use of telling it?" He works much more slowly than many, seldom putting more than a thousand words a day on paper. He is one of the few writers trained in the newspaper office who write with pencil instead of direct on the typewriter, and he prefers to work in the afternoon rather than in the morning. "I like to get any little things I may have to do out of the way, go downtown for lunch, and come back to quiet and peace of mind for the day's writing. If I'm not going out in the evening, I often work after dinner, too."

His plan of life is consistent and proportioned. He turns out an оссаsional short story; but it is the novels he prefers, the realistic novels above all.

He is writing again now of the Indiana country he knows, and the Hoosier people. He is not afraid to face the facts of life in his work, even

though he dashes off sometimes into realms of purple cloaks and beautiful princesses. Whether he writes of wheat fields, of happiness or tragedy, of this much we may be sure: that he will write a good story. For the boy who conceived the tale of "Panther Jim" was born in the farm land that fosters dreams and nurtured in the newspaper office that crystallizes adventure and dramatizes the parade of events. If his wanderings in mythical kingdoms are greeted by a wider public, he will yet find those who appreciate to the full his knowledge of the soil. We still have an unreasoning love for those who lift us from daily life; but we also have a deepening gratitude for those writers who attempt to tell us of American life as it really is. Whether George Barr McCutcheon writes of Graustark which he has made his own, or of Indiana which has always been his own, he will find a public ready to read with affection and respect.

FOR

OR some time past there has been a growing need for a new society of humanitarian purpose. There are organizations to prevent cruelty to animals, cruelty to children; there are Bide-a-wee homes for stray dogs and cats; but nothing whatever has been done for the protection of authors, visiting and otherwise. Recently New York has had two visitors who were exposed to unusually cruel and inhuman treatment. They were gentlemen as far apart in outward signs as the two poles, but the treatment accorded them was marked by a uniform mercilessness. What there may be about a writer which is so different from a stock broker or a department store proprietor it is difficult to say; doubtless it is an illusion which flourishes, especially in these days when every hostess must possess a lion or two and the bohemian note must be struck noisily. Indeed, in some cases recently, it is rumored that the competition for the possession of the current lion became so great that ladies were known to have paid good money to secure his presence. This, of course, opens new vistas for the "starving" writer. Let him hire a good press agent and work up enough competition, and he may stop work altogether and simply live upon his earnings as a specimen.

The visit of James Stephens was in all respects a remarkable success. One cannot help feeling that if some of those who came to see would stay to

buy and read, the tribute would be more deeply appreciated by Mr. Stephens. He proved to be a charming fellow, swarthy, small, with a long Velasquez face and an irresistible manner. There is a quaintness and whimsicality (oh, abused words!) about the author of "The Crock of Gold" which is overwhelming. When he is reciting his own poetry, even in a lecture room crowded with dowagers, one cannot help feeling that he is first cousin to a leprechaun.

The visit of Michael Arlen has been, doubtless, treated elsewhere in THE BOOKMAN. He is, in many respects, the antithesis of Stephens. He is small but more elegantly made, and about him there is that note of silky finish which marks his writing. The crowds which attended the urbane, supercivilized Arlen differed greatly from those which surrounded Stephens. Mr. Arlen attracted the people about town-actors, writers, journalists, and a sprinkling of the social element. There were teas, lunches, dances, dinners, in an endless procession. In odd moments (Mr. Arlen, like Thomas Edison, needs only two hours' sleep), he attended rehearsals of "The Green Hat" which has caused the defection of Katharine Cornell from that beautiful production which the Actors' Theatre has made of "Candida". Her place, however, is being well taken by Peggy Wood, too good an actress to be wasted upon sugary musical shows.