She has had work published in the People's Home Journal, Snappy Stories, Breezy Stories, and Young's Magazine.

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Marion Lyon Fairbanks, who wrote the story, "The Open Gate," which was published in Young's Magazine for May, is the wife of Sheldon H. Fairbanks, a special writer for the Detroit News. Mrs. Fairbanks was born in New York, received most of her education in Boston, studied music at the Fessler School in Cleveland, and has made her home in Detroit for the past four years. Because of her early interest in music, she says the idea of writing did not occur to her until she was twenty-one At that time two Sunday papers in Cleveland were featuring similar contests; 300-word essays on "human problems"- the usual sort of thing "Is a White Lie Ever Justifiable?" or "Is the Modern Woman More to Be Desired than the Clinging Vine?" All essays printed were paid for, and Mrs. Fairbanks had about twenty consecutive essays accepted. So, despite her sense of humor, creating fiction seemed to her a reasonably short step, and she began by studying books on the subject by Esenwein and Neal, which proved helpful; but in the next two years although she wrote ten short stories, none of them sold. Two poems, however, were accepted by Munsey's, and some light verse of the "filler" type also sold. Then Young's Magazine bought a story, and in the past three years Mrs. Fairbanks has sold twenty-five more stories, some of them novelettes, to the C. H. Young Publishing Company, some of which have appeared in Young's Magazine and some in Breezy Stories. Mrs. Fairbanks says she finds her greatest help in inveterate reading, May Sinclair and Edith Wharton being her favorites, and that there are three stages of joy in her work: First, the conception of the idea and the day-dreaming thereof; then the actual writing of perhaps the first four pages. From then on, she says, it is largely grind, and the final typing of the manuscript is the worst part, rewarded, however, at the mail box by a feeling which she says she can describe only as a peace that passeth all understanding. Mrs. Fairbanks finds it advisable to think out her stories in detail for two or three months before writing them. She feels then that she is closely acquainted with the characters, and

they become as clearly defined as living personalities.

Louisa Fletcher (Mrs. Willard Connely), whose poem, "Mandarin Red," appeared in Harper's Magazine for May, was born in Indianapolis, and is a graduate of Smith College. Under her former name, Louisa Fletcher Tarkington, she has had poems, including "The Land of Beginning Again," published in Scribner's, the Century, the Metropolitan, Ainslee's, Harper's Bazar, the Cosmopolitan, St. Nicholas, and the Smart Set. Before "Mandarin Red," her most recently published poem was Strife's End," which appeared in McClure's Magazine for April, 1918.

Nancy Barr Mavity, author of the poem, "The Home Maker," which was published in the Century for April, was born in Illinois in 1890, reared in Iowa, and educated in Ohio. She is a graduate of Wellesley, and holds the degree of Ph.D. from Cornell University, and says she has lived, worked, and played in various cities from Philadelphia and New York to San Francisco. She taught English for two years at Connecticut College, and then gave up teaching for editorial work with a publishing house in New York. After a few months of this, she married a member of the staff of a rival publishing house, but both members of the family continued to work side by side. For the last two years Mrs. Mavity has lived in California, where she is assistant literary editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. She has contributed essays and verse to the Bookman, the Dial, the Unpartizan Review, the Delineator, the Designer, Everybody's Magazine, Contemporary Verse, the Masses, the Liberator, the Forum, and the North American Review, and during her stay in New York she was one of the book reviewers for the New York Evening Post. Mrs. Mavity's verse is represented in three anthologies the "Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1917," the "Masque of Poets," and "Contemporary Verse Anthology."

Chicago, and for several years has been a regular paid contributor to the editorial page of a Chicago paper. In addition, Miss Walton writes, and acts in, plays on Colonial history, and she has had contributions in nearly forty magazines. Miss Walton says she wrote “The Bethany Stage" because she loves New England and its history, which is the history of her own ancestors. She is a genealogical enthusiast, and with her mother went on a genealogical jaunt, becoming much interested in the villages in which they stayed, and to one of which they journeyed in the wagonette that became the base of her story. She kept turning the idea over in her mind, she says, until it was all thought out before putting the story on paper. Miss Walton adds that she has never sold a story that she wrote up too soon after getting the basic idea.

Caleb Wrath, who had a story, Smelted from the Same Ore," in Scribner's Magazine for May, and a story, "The Cobbler of Acanthus Alley," in the May Bookman, wrote his first story behind one of the life-boats on the upper deck of a transport homeward bound from Havre a little more than a year ago. "Smelted from the Same Ore" was rewritten five times, and now is being translated into Spanish and will be reprinted in that language in the magazine, Inter-America. From collaboration in the translation of French novels, Mr. Wrath graduated successively into free-lance newspaper work in New York city, and thence into short-story writing. He has just completed a farcical novel, entitled "The Everwake Venture," which he hopes to adapt for presentation as a dramatic farce, as soon as arrangements for periodical and motion-picture rights are completed.

PERSONAL GOSSIP ABOUT AUTHORS.

Aumonier.-Stacy Aumonier declares that he "just drifted into literature in the philandering manner of the majority of writers." The drifting took him far from London, to Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Holland, America, and Canada. He is of Huguenot descent. His ancestors were silversmiths who came to Spitalfields after the massacre of St. Bartholomew; and nearly all his relatives

have been craftsmen of some sort. But his natural bent was for acting, and before the war he had made quite a reputation by giving character sketches, impressions of various people he had met in the streets, on buses and tubes, and about the country-side. This profession was swept away by the war. He served then as a chart maker, for he had had training as a decorative draughtsman in London and Paris. By then he had started to write, and among the war activities of "a despised B3 man" he managed to solace himself with this new-found pleasure. His first writing was a short story called "The Friends." Although a literary agent told him that no one would touch such a story (it was about two furniture salesmen who drank themselves to death), it proved one of his most successful tales.

Field. Eugene Field's "Little Boy Blue" was published in the first issue of America, a weekly with which one of his close friends was connected. In that number also appeared James Russell Lowell's "St. Michael the Weigher." A race for popularity between the poems at once developed. Which would have the greater run in the newspapers of the country? "Field and I," Charles H. Dennis writes in the Chicago Daily News, "looked for them through innumerable newspaper pages, clipping them and counting the clippings. To Field's great glee, 'Little Boy Blue,' written as it was by an unknown poet, soon began to outrun Lowell's more pretentious effort. Its lead grew longer day by day, till it was plainly established. One day I tried to perpetrate a fraud on Field. With the help of the printers, I made up a bundle of spurious clippings of St. Michael the Weigher' and laid them on Field's desk in an imposing pile, far outweighing the day's clippings of 'Little Boy Blue.' When Field came in he was riveted by the clippings for half an hour. Then his sudden guffaw announced discovery of the fraud. 'Oh, no,' he said. That won't go down. Mike needs your help badly, but the Little Boy Blue will beat you both.''

Most of Field's poetry, says Dennis, was written very late at night. He was an insatiable theatre-goer; and life was so full of emotions, friendships, and "whimsies" that he could hardly settle down to concentrated

thinking except at midnight. Once he assiduously wrote and stored up poems for weeks in order that he might, as he said, "astonish the natives." He had already filled his column one day from top to bottom with a series of poems of high quality. When the appointed time arrived it was the week of July 15, 1889- he filled it with poems of his best workmanship for six successive days. The feat attracted wide attention, and Field always recalled it with elation.

Dennis relates how Field defended to him his method of rendering Horace, which some critic attacked as impudent. "In paraphrasing the lighter verses." he said. "I begin by asking myself how Horace would write those verses if he were alive to-day, amid surroundings similar to mine. He was a joyous spirit and certainly he would express himself joyously and rhythmically if he were now on the earth. So I try to interpret Horace in a way to bring his pagan poetry up to date. At least, I give him the best in the shop."

Hay. — The first poem of John Hay to get into print was "Little Breeches." Royal Cortissoz tells the story in the first of the two volumes of his "Life of Whitelaw Reid" (Scribner). Hay passed the verses across the table to Reid one evening when they were dining at the Union League Club. Reid read them and put them in his pocket, remarking that he would give them a conspicuous place in the Tribune in a day or two. Hay seemed greatly surprised. shook his head incredulously and replied: "You wouldn't dare to." Doubtless he was thinking of the closing lines of the poem : And I think that saving a little child, And fotching him to his own,

Is a derned sight better business

Than loafing around the Throne.

He

But Reid was as good as his word, and on the evening of the day of their publication Hay, riding uptown in a horsecar, had the agreeable experience of seeing a man whom he had not known take the poem out of his pocket and read it to a neighbor.

Within a week or two Hay wrote the next of the series, "Jim Bludso." Reid handed it back with the observation that the last stanza was not worthy of the rest, and that a

much more effective ending was possible. Hay accepted the criticism and wrote another ending, which also Reid rejected, saying that it could be improved upon, and suggesting that the poem ought to be wound up with epigrammatic snap. Unfortunately, these two endings do not seem to have been preserved. The third version, which Hay finished a day or two later, is the one which appeared in the Tribune. The twice-changed ending had become the now familiar lines

And Christ ain't a-going to be too hard On a man that died for men. Mason. While Emporia was mourning the loss of Walt Mason, who sold his home there and was reported to have adopted California as his home, the prose poet sent a letter to an Emporia newspaper announcing that he has not deserted the Sunflower state. Mr. Mason describes the building of his house" the House that Walt Built" in the following letter :

"We have sold our Emporia house, at least the preliminary papers have been signed and sealed. It has caused me many a moment of anguish and remorse, for the old house on Twelfth avenue means a lot to me. When I built it, I expected to end my days under its roof; and the building thereof was my biggest achievement in this world. I am proud of that house, and I hope with reason. has never been a mortgage on it. I never borrowed any money to finish it. Before it was half done, I realized it was going to cost a great deal more money than I figured onand I had n't the money. But I buckled down to my old typewriter and made it smoke day and night.

There

"During summer and fall when the house was under construction I wrote more stuff than the law allows. I wrote my syndicate rhymes and six prose stories a week for the Chicago News, and a Sunday story for The Kansas City Star, and twenty rhymes a month for trade papers, and a rhyme a week for Judge, and Heaven only knows how many other masterpieces. Tommy Cox (the contractor) would notify me that he would need $800 in a few days, and instead of borrowing it I chanked up the typewriter and earned it. All that summer and fall I had rheumatism.

I used to go limping up from our State-street house to the new mansion on Twelfth, often so discouraged and blue I wished I had never dreamed a dream of a brand new house on the avenue. And we moved in a few days before Christmas, and Charlie (Mr. Mason's brother) and his folks came down from Seneca and there was snow everywhere, and we had a big log in the new fireplace, and the furnace also was crackling away, and it was the grandest Christmas I ever knew, and I was the proudest old relic you ever saw, for I had built and furnished the blamed shanty and did n't owe a dollar on it.

"And now another man, with whiskers, will sit on that big front porch and watch the autos go by, and he won't care anything about the story of pain and hard work woven into the fabric of the place. But I realized two or three years ago that Kansas winters were going to send me to an untimely grave if I stayed with them. My winters in Emporia for several years have meant misery for me, the snow and the slush and the wet pavements filled me with pyrotechnic pains, and I usually had one foot or the other done up in a suitcase. Last winter was so long and cold, and my hand-to-hand combats with the furnace in the basement were taking so much out of me that I decided I could n't endure any more of it. So I sold the good old house. But 1 haven't quit Emporia. I am keeping an auto there and it is more useful to me than a house.

"I hope to go back for the fall months every year after this year, and just hang around the beloved old town until the snow and the sleet stuff get busy, and then chase myself to warmer clime." - Kansas City Star.

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CURRENT LITERARY TOPICS.

Journalism in Fiction. -"A curious fascination seems to surround a modern newspaper magnate, and novelists and dramatists find it irresistible. Indeed, it is not only the man who runs the machine, but the whole mechanism of journalism itself, in all its various branches, which appears to provide an inexhaustible subject for curious inquiry. If

we go back a few years we have 'The Street of Adventure,' by Sir Philip Gibbs, and perhaps a cleverer book still, 'Little Devil Doubt,' by Oliver Onions. Then there is Arnold Bennett, with his careful study of Sir Charles Worgan in 'What the Public Wants.' Simultaneously there was a play at the Kingsway Theatre, 'The Earth,' by James Bernard Fagan, with Norman McKinnel playing the part of Sir Felix Janion. Coming down to quite modern times, we have St. John Ervine's 'The Foolish Lovers' and Miss Ruth Macauley's 'Potterism.' And now to end the list we have W. L. George's latest novel, published by Methuen, to which he gives the succinct and not too complimentary title of Caliban.' I imagine that Caliban' is Mr. George's name for his successful newspaper proprietor, just as Potter and Potterism stand in Miss Macaulay's mind as apt nomenclature for the journalistic mind. Why journalism should thus be singled out amongst all the modern industries for this close and intensive study is a little difficult to say, but there exists, perhaps, a curious psychological interest as part of the fascination of the subject. The world apparently wants to know, at all events the novelist wants to know, what strange kind of phenomenon the newspaper magnate represents in his concentration for a given purpose, and his supposed neglect of most of the ordinary amenities of life. In some cases the novelist obviously draws out of his inner consciousness the portrait of his hero. In other cases he takes one or two living personages as his models, and suggests at all events, if he does not absolutely indicate, that he is writing a roman à clef.”—W. L. Courtney in London Daily Telegraph.

The Art of the American Novelist.—The American novelist begins his career with a crude but powerful" novel that does not succeed, and a few well-made short stories that do. Two years later his mind has cleared, his eye sharpened, his pen grown more skilful. He writes a novel that serializes successfully, disposes of 20,000 copies, and then sells his story to the melting pot of the movies for a very substantial check. His six months' work has brought him what for

most professional men would be two years' good income. His name is known, his market is ready, all he has to do is to write. Skill he possesses and a knowledge of his public. Only his art is incomplete. It lacks finish, it lacks depth, it lacks most of all the maturity that comes from ardent, unremitting labor, and he knows it. His style is good; it is not excellent. It expresses his imaginings; it will not, like a great style, preserve them. Why doesn't he stop large-scale production, and learn to write?

This is the turning point, and nine out of ten able Americans turn to the left. They increase facility; they do not intensify their art. They lay hands upon more of the public; they do not tighten their grip. They write more books, but not better books.

Why don't they stop? Since they belong to a nation of speculators, why are they so unwilling to speculate with their popularity? Why do they invest their capital of reputation dully in the routine of a standardized output, instead of using it to produce something new, something better, which will bring them satisfaction as well as cash? Are they timid, these captains-of-fiction, or are they more enamored of luxury than of their profession?

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Neither implication is wholly true, but there is truth in both. If Geoffry Wildairs, the successful author, makes $10,000 a year, he contracts obligations in the form of automobiles, clubs, and taste for Southern climates in February that require fifteen thousand to satisfy them; and there is no sure way of making ten thousand grow to fifteen thousand while perfecting one's art - while, having learned to write well, learning to write better. Therefore he pursues the nymph of luxury instead of the goddess of fame, and finds her quite as elusive, and knows her to be less excellent.

No one asks the American novelist to starve like his Grub Street predecessor. For Geoffry Wildairs and his fellows that is quite unnecessary. We grant him five, ten, even fifteen thousand a year as a "living wage"; and his attempt to dig in, to consolidate his art, is not likely, as publishing goes nowadays, to cause much, if any diminution. But he

must say I have enough income to keep me afloat; now for good work.

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Why does n't he say it? Is the professional spirit less strong in America than in England and France? Has writing with us become a business, with the code of a business instead of a profession? Do we lack the strength of resistance which alone enables a writer to write for sufficient profits from great excellence, instead of great profits from continuing mediocrity: For it is weak to write a strong" novel when one can write a good one; and in the long run it is foolish. Not even in this heyday of short-story and movie profits can an author keep up with a profiteer, a picture star, or a stock manipulator. The ultimate luxury is ever beyond his reach. He may achieve four bathrooms, but scarcely an indoor swimming pool. He may Own two cars and a saddle horse, but three and a stable will be out of his reach.

When the money begins to come in a steady flow instead of drop by drop, when one's name goes from the bottom to the top of the column, then is the time to take counsel with perfection, to consult the desires of the spirit, to ask whether it is better to be the author of five good books or ten thousand facile pages.

There are, at a guess, fifty American novelists making this year incomes so large that only extravagance can spend them. Ten of these are writing precisely what their Lord and Maker in His inscrutable wisdom created them to write. Ten are convinced that next year they will slow down production and go on a quality instead of a quantity basis. Ten have hardened their hearts and long since thrown over vain regrets for what they might have written. Five have won through to a success they never expected by doing the best that was in them, let come what might. And the rest, however high-hearted and flippantly cynical in public are familiar with the dead spaces of the night when there is gnashing of teeth for the reward which alone tempts them

New

the reward of a durable excellence - now known to be forever out of reach. York Evening Post.