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navy, public health service, organized militia, U. S. volunteers, and reserves of the United States. Competition closes January 1, 1920. Particulars in October WRITER.

Prizes of $10, $5, and subscription to the Etude offered by the Etude for the best letters on "How I Collect My Bills."

Prize of $1,000 offered by the World Trade Club, for the single new word, submitted by May 15, 1920, which will best denote the United States and all parts of Britannia. Particulars in October WRITER.

Gratuity prize of £100 for the best reputed story published in 1920 by the London publisher, Herbert Jenkins. Particulars in October WRITER. American Historical Association prize of $250 for the best essay on American military history submitted before July 1, 1920. Particulars in September WRITER.

Hawthornden prize of £100 for the best work of imaginative literature in English prose or poetry, published during the previous twelve months. Particulars in September WRITER.

Prize of $1,000 for a new air for the Yale song, "Bright College Years," offered by the Yale class of 1899. Particulars in August WRITER.

Prizes of $500, $250, and $100 in a Religious Drama contest, conducted by the Drama League of America, 306 Riggs Building, Washington. Contest to close December 1. Particulars in August WRITER.

Hart, Schaffner, & Marx prizes of $2,000 for the four best studies in the economic field submitted before June 1, 1920. Particulars in July WRITER. Prize of $2,000 for the best essay on "The Control of the Foreign Relations of the United States : the Relative Rights, Duties, and Responsibilities of the President, of the Senate and the House, and of the Judiciary, in Theory and in Practice," offered by the American Philosophical Society. Com. petition to close December 31, 1920. Particulars in July WRITER.

O. Henry Memorial Prize of $500, offered by the Society of Arts & Sciences, ior the best short story published in America in 1919. Particulars in THE WRITER for April and May.

The Poetry Society of America prize of $500, offered through Columbia University, for the best book of poetry by an American published in 1919. Particulars in June WRITER.

Walker Trust open prize of £200 and eight limited prizes of £25 each for essays on "Spiritual Regeneration," offered by the University of St. Andrew's, Scotland, submitted before March 1, 1920. Particulars in June WRITER.

Monthly prizes offered by the Photo-Era (Boston) for photographs, in an advanced competition and a beginner's competition.

Weekly prizes offered by the Boston Post for original short stories by women, published each day. Particulars in January WRITER.

Prizes of two dollars and one dollar offered monthly by Wohelo (New York) for stories, short poems, and essays, written by Camp Fire girls.

Particulars in November WRITER.

The Boston Evening Record is paying one dollar

each week day for a poem written by a Record reader.

WRITERS OF THE DAY.

Janet Allan Bryan (Mrs. William James Bryan), whose story, "Mothers and Others," came out in the Youth's Companion for October 2, does not regard herself as a professional writer, although for a number of years she has been a contributor to such periodicals as Forward, the Classmate, Our Young People, and the Canadian juveniles. Mrs. Bryan spent her youth in the atmosphere of a college town Lexington, Virginia where the home of her grandmother, Mrs. Margaret J. Preston, was long a centre of literary and artistic life. Since the death of Mrs. Bryan's husband the brilliant young senator from Florida, who died shortly after taking his seat in Washington she has made a home for her children in Jacksonville.

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"Evelyn Heath," the name signed to the story, "When Love is Lord," in the October number of Young's Magazine, is the pseudonym of Frances Harmer, whose novelette, "A Newport Nobody," ran in the second October issue of Snappy Stories. Miss Harmer is English by birth, but she has lived in this country for several years, alternately teaching and writing. At present she is reading scripts in the Lasky studio in Hollywood, California, and studying continuity writing. Her short stories and novelettes have appeared in Saucy Stories, the Parisienne, Ainslee's, Smith's, the Green Book, Hearst's, the Farmer's Wife, the Farm Journal, the Woman's Magazine, McCall's, the Sunday American Supplement, and other publications. One story, "Saving the Family Name," which appeared in Young's Magazine, was filmed by Lois Weber, with Mary

McLaren as the star. Miss Harmer lived for some years in New York, and deciares that everything in "When Love Is Lord" either happened, or could have happened, in that City of Limitless Possibilities.

Joseph T. Kescel, who had a story, "Rusty on the Track," in the October St. Nicholas, was born in Monroe, N. Y., but spent his early life in widely separated mining sections of the West, or of Old Mexico. At the age of fourteen he left school and went to work in one of the camp stores, remaining there two years, and then becoming a mail boy, carrying mail on horseback or on skis to one of the mines some distance back in the mountains. He continued this work until he was eighteen, when he again attended school for a short time, and then secured employment in an ore reduction plant, later specializing in extracting metals from the raw ore. This work took him to Mexico, and when a gun flashed in the moonlight as a drunken Mexican popped up from behind some barrels where he had lain in ambush and a load of shot struck Mr. Kescel's face, instantly blinding him, he was thirty-seven years old. Two months later several of New York's foremost specialists confirmed the opinion of others that he had already interviewed in Mexico City. His eyesight was permanently destroyed. By four o'clock of the same day, after a visit to the New York Association for the Blind, he was very much heartened to find that there were many occupations in which he might engage and still continue, as in the past, entirely self-supporting. At the New York Association for the Blind and at the office of the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind, Mr. Kescel learned a great many things, including the use of some tools, the manipulation of a typewriter and of a shorthand machine, and the reading and writing of raised print. He also learned, he says, "what cannot be taught, even by people with the best intento keep a stiff upper lip, head up, smile, and plug. . . . Smiles and a good front will attract people," he adds, "so keep smiling, keep plugging, and things will shape up all right. Besides, if one is busy, there is no time to think about a thing that had best

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be forgotten." Mr. Kescel tried several different kinds of work before taking up writing, and it was nearly a year after his first story started on the rounds of the magazine offices before one was accepted. Among the magazines that have since published his work are Munsey's, the American Boy, the magazines of the Street & Smith Corporation, St. Nicholas, the Black Cat, Boys' Life, Uncle Sam's Boy (defunct), the Overland Monthly, the Boys' Magazine, the People's Popular Monthly, Saucy Stories, Boy Life, Ropeco, the Fisk Club News, Browning's Magazine, and the Parisienne.

PERSONAL GOSSIP ABOUT AUTHORS.

Ferber. Edna Ferber says: "The entire output of my particular job depends upon me. By that I mean that when I put the cover on my typewriter the works are closed. The office equipment consists of one flat table, rather messy; one typewriter, much abused, and one typewriter table; a chunk of yellow copy paper and one of white. All the wheels, belts, wires, bolts, fires, tools the whole has got manufacturing scheme of things

to be contained in the space between my chin and my topmost hairpin ; and my one horror, my nightmare of nightmares, is that some morning I'll wake up and find that space vacant, and the works closed down, with a mental sign over the front door reading: "For Rent. Fine, large, empty head. Inquire within.'

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first chapter within a month. A week passed and the plot did not come." A second week followed and the plot had not arrived. Miss Jordan, who cheerfully concedes that she has never worried over anything in her life, began to look thoughtful.

At the beginning of the third week, when she was standing before a long mirror in her dressing-room one morning, severely regarding some newly-arrived grey hairs on her left temple and attributing them to the delayed plot, she suddenly saw a vision in her mirror. The vision was a young girl, a very pretty one, sitting on a window-sill and apparently looking straight at her. Miss Jordan studied the phenomenon a moment, and then realized that the vision was a trick of refraction a cross projection from some building which itself remained unseen. By hanging out of a side window near her mirror she discovered the building a squat studio apartment house on the southeast corner of Gramercy Park.

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Tarkington. Booth Tarkington does his work at an artist's drawing-table. Always he has disdained a typewriter. The drawingtable he can adjust to any light, any pose that may suit his comfort at the moment. With a little stack of paper before him, he sets about the business of composition. Every phrase is pondered, balanced, scrutinized before it is permitted to pass. As often as not, a dozen phrases have been rejected before the final one which seems to readers to come so trippingly has been arrived at. Individual words are scored out again and again. Were a manuscript subjected to any such rigorous revising with pen and ink or fountain pen, it would very soon, what with deletions, interlineations, and changed words, become illegible beyond all hope one huge blot. Hence Mr. Tarkington uses quantities of lead pencils. In a great pile they wait, ready sharpened, on the shelf of his drawing-table. As soon as one is dulled, he throws it aside and picks up another. Thus it is that Penrod,

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"In a questionnaire submitted to the various studios in Hollywood and vicinity, three questions were asked First How many scenarios were purchased during the year 1918? Second: How many were rejected? Third: What was the chief reason for rejection? To give a fair idea of the results obtained from the questionnaire, the following answers are enumerated :

"The American Film company, at Santa Barbara, Calif., purchased fifteen scenarios and rejected 3,072. The Brentwood Film corporation purchased one and rejected fifty. The Brunton Studio, which during the forepart of the year 1918 was purchasing stories for Bessie Barriscale and Louise Glaum, rejected 2,450 scenarios and arranged for the purchase of 100.

"The Chaplin Studio rejected 3,500 and purchased one. The Christie Studio read 5,000 stories, bought 110 and produced 104. The Fairbanks Studio purchased six stories, out of 1,171 submitted.

"M. M. Stearns of the Dorothy Gish company says that ninety-nine per cent. of the scenarios submitted were rejected and that of the remaining one per cent. four were purchased, and several are now being held on option, awaiting the star's decision, whether or not to purchase. D. W. Griffith bought fifteen stories during the year. He rejected in the neighborhood of 9,000.

"William S. Hart reports the purchase of eight stories out of 3,000 submitted. The Metro Pictures corporation, in answering the questionnaires, said that sixty stories were purchased and that they presumed somewhere

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in the neighborhood of a million had been turned down.

"The National Studio purchased twelve stories out of 1,872. Mary Pickford bought one submitted scenario and has been rejecting an average of five a day."

The studio reported further, Mr. Robbins says, that most of the scenarios submitted were not suitable screen material.

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"It is quite probable," he adds, that twenty per cent. of the scenarios depend on dialogue to tell the story, and at least forty per cent. leave characterization entirely out of the synopsis."

Mr. Robbins questioned producers as to what they desire, and learned that "the two things most wanted are characterization and situation."

The scenario writer is warned against attempting to put his story in technical form. The conditions in each studio vary, and each employs its own experts to prepare the continuities from which the directors work. All they want from outsiders is synopses.

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Misinformed Poets. There is a crying need for a "Poet's Handbook of Science." W. R. Benét, for instance, should be informed that bats do not hang in barns at night, that they fly around at night and hang there in the day-time Lola Ridge, that palms do not grow on mesas, that jaguars do not inhabit deserts, etc., etc. I pause only because I have not now the time or energy to write the book. strongly suspect that the time so spent would be of greater service to the muse than the perpetration of masterpieces! A. Y. Winters, in Poetry.

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Literature, Success, and Money. The fact that Amelia E. Barr wrote sixty-five books and died worth less than $600 will renew the talk about lack of money in literature; but don't forget that Amelia had lived comfortably for many a year on her pen.

A great number of American writers of the past generation have earned double as much every year as the salary of a United States senator. Their income matched that of the Chief Justice or the admiral of the navy when we had one. Richard Harding Davis, Robert W. Chambers, George Ade, Rex Beach, Mrs Rinehart, are only a few of quite an array of writers who have lived handsomely on their

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How TO STUDY THE BEST SHORT STORIES. Blanche Colton Williams, Ph.D. 222 pp. Cloth. Boston Small, Maynard, & Company. 1919. Students of the art of short-story writing can get much help from this book of analyses of the stories published in the series of yearbooks, compiled by Edwin J. O'Brien, of the best short stories for 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1918. Supplementing her own analyses of the stories, Mrs. Williams gives information secured from the authors of more than thirty of them, telling how their stories were conceived, developed, and finally written, thus teaching by example to some extent their methods of literary work. Gertrude Atherton, for instance, says: "I rarely have the solution of a story or a novel in my mind, merely the principal character, the central idea, and the mise en scène. I prefer to let the story work itself out." This view is indorsed by Maxwell Struthers Burt, who says "The story ordinarily comes to me as an incident or a theme, sometimes as. character in a certain incident. Then usually nothing happens for a long time. If I try to think about it too much, so much the worse. In about a month I'll think about it again, and then, as a rule, it begins to evolve. A great deal of the incident occurs to me while I am actually writing." Mrs. Williams, who has a class in storywriting at Columbia University, and whose

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Handbook on Story Writing" is perhaps the best book on the writing of the short story now available, believes that the art of story writing can be taught, and certainly if a student has natural ability he can learn much from a well-directed study of technique.

MAIN CURRENTS OF SPANISH LITERATURE. By J. D. M. Ford. 284 pp. Cloth. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1919.

"My aim," Professor Ford says in his introduction, "is to afford a survey of certain important currents running through the history of Spanish literature as written in the motherland, and to call attention to the great worth of the literature produced by writers in Spanish America." The eight divisions of the book were delivered as lectures in the winter of 1918 at the Lowell Institute in Boston. The eight chapters take up: The Heroic Tradition: The Epic

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The Ballad; Cervantes : The Man and His Work; The Rise of the Drama and its Triumph in the Golden Age: Lope de Vega; The Culmination of the Dramatic MoveCalderón; Lyric Poetry; ment : The Novel; and High Points of Spanish-American Literature. The book, which is eminently readable, is something more than an outline of the development of Spanish literature; it is an excellent history of the literature of Spain and Spanish America for the general reader.

WORDS AND SENTENCES. By H. S. V. Jones, Ph.D. Cloth. 150 pp. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1919.

In the section of his book devoted to words, Dr. Jones, who is assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois, has chapters on Derivations, The Meanings of Words, The Standing of Words, Spelling, and Pronunciation, and in the section devoted to sentences, in the first part he takes up the different parts of speech, and in the second discusses The Rhetoric of the Sentence, with chapters on Clearness, Emphasis, and Ease. An Appendix has chapters on the Conjugation of the Verb, Punctuation, and Capitalization.

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MODEL ENGLISH. Book II: The Style. By Francis P. Donnelly, S.J. 301 pp. Cloth. Boston Allyn & Bacon. 1919. Father Donnelly is professor of English at Holy Cross College, and this second Book of his Model English," like the first, is Inintended primarily for classroom use. vention, the finding of thoughts to establish or amplify the truth of a statement, was the chief topic of Book I., better known under its former title, 'Imitation and Analysis." Invention, Father Donnelly points out, is the first stage in the art of composition. The second is the arrangement of the thoughts. The third stage, the fitting expression of the thoughts, is the subject of this Book. Arrangement is adequately treated in both Books. Model English" is the outgrowth of long years of oractical experience in the classroom, and it is a very useful work.

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THE FINE ART OF PHOTOGRAPHY. By Paul L. Anderson, E.E. Illustrated. 315 pp. Cloth. Philadelphia J. B. Lippincott Company. 1919. This new book by the author of "Pictorial Photography : Its Principles and Practice" will be warmly welcomed by photographers aiming to do artistic work. Mr. Anderson gives ample reason for including photography in the fine arts and justifies his belief that the photographer may be a real artist both by the reasoning of his text and by the artistic photographic illustrations of his book, of which there are twenty-four, with a frontispiece in colors. Earnest photographers will find innumerable suggestions of value in his discussion of such topics as Composition, Values, Sugges

tion and Mystery, Landscape Work, Winter Work, Landscape with Figures, Genre, Illustration, Architectural Work, Marine Work, Motion-Picture Work, and Portraiture, concluding with the Philosophy of the Hand Camera and remarks on Technic. Every photographer, amateur or professional, who wants to use his camera to the best advantage should own a copy of this book.

THE HARVEST HOME. Collected Poems of James B. Kenyon. 414 pp. Cloth. New York: James T. White & Co. 1920.

This is one of the attractive volumes of poetry published by James T. White & Co. an autographed copy of an edition of 550 copies, printed from type that has now been distributed. Type, paper, press-work, and binding are all in exquisite taste. The poems are collected from the nine volumes published by Dr. Kenyon, and many of them are reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly, the Century, Scribner's, and other leading publications. Dr. Kenyon's verse is graceful, melodious, refined and delicate in sentiment and in expression, and this collection of it makes a book of charming poetry.

BOOKS RECEIVED:

[THE WRITER is pleased to receive for review any books about authors, authorship, language, or lit erary topics or any books that would be of real value in a writer's library, such as works of reference, history, biography. or travel. There is no Space in the magazine for the review of fiction, poetry, etc. All books received will be acknowledged under this heading. Selections will be made for review in the interest of THE WRITER'S readers.] THE AMERICAN LITERARY YEARBOOK. Edited by Hamilton Traub. 276 pp. Cloth. Henning, 1919. Minn. Paul Traub.

THE STREET OF ADVENTURE. By Philip Gibbs. Authorized American edition, with a special preface by the author. 437 pp. Cloth. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1919.

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