varying metrical or rhythmic effect, while the theme should be youthful and vigorous, embodying the idea of struggle followed by vic'tory. Poems will be judged according to their merit as poetry and their suitability for use in a cantata. Manuscripts must be typewritten and submitted anonymously, bearing some identifying mark, and being accompanied by a sealed envelope containing the full name and address of the author, with return postage, and having the identifying mark on the outside. Manuscripts must not be rolled or folded, and should be marked 'Poetry Contest." The competition will end June 1. 66 Voices (3 Minetta Lane, New York) offers a prize of $25 for the best poem published in Volume IV of the magazine, the last number of which will appear in October, 1925. Hart, Schaffner, & Marx offer a new prize of $5,000 for the best original treatise on the Theory of Wages. No restrictions are placed upon the scope, method, or character of the studies submitted, beyond the requirement that they make genuine contributions toward the understanding of the problem. Manuscripts must be in English, and should be sent under an assumed name, and be accompanied by sealed envelopes giving real names and addresses, together with degrees, distinctions, or positions held. The ownership of the copyright will vest in the donors, who will arrange for the publication of the book. Manuscripts should be sent by October 1, 1926, to J. Laurence Laughlin, University of Chicago, Illinois, to whom all inquiries should be addressed. This offer is entirely distinct from the annual competition in Classes A and B of the Hart, Schaffner, & Marx prizes. The third quarterly award for the best poem printed in the Stratford Monthly during the three preceding months was divided between "To the Blind Men," by Edward J. O'Brien, in the October issue, and "The Dunes," by Harry Kemp, in the November issue. The Stratford Monthly ceased publication with the January number, so that there will be no more prize offers for poetry. The first prize of $1,250 in the fourth quarterly short-story competition conducted by Harper's Magazine has been awarded to Wilbur Daniel Steele, for "When Hell Froze." The second prize of $750 was awarded to Charles Caldwell Dobie, for "Wild Geese," and the third prize of $500 was awarded to Mrs. Phoebe H. Gilkyson, for "The Amateur." During the year 10,370 stories were submitted in the contest. The prize of $500 offered by Elsie Janis for the best comedy sketch submitted to her by an amateur before June 1 has been awarded to a sixteen-year-old writer in Oklahoma City, and the competition has been brought to a close. Prize offers still open : Prizes in Letters offered by the Columbia University School of Journalism: For the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood, $1,000 for the original American play, performed in New York, which shall best represent the educational value and power of the stage in raising the standard of good morals, good taste, and good manners, $1,000; for the best book of the year on the history of the United States, $2,000; for the best American biography teaching patriotic and unselfish services to the people, illustrated by an eminent example, $1,000; for the best volume of verse published during the year by an American author, $1,000. Also, Prizes in Journalism, amounting to $3,000 and a $500 medal, and three traveling scholarships having a value of $1,500 each. All offered annually under the terms of the will of Joseph Pulitzer. Nominations of candidates must be made in writing on or before February 1 of each year, addressed to the Secretary of Columbia University, New York, on forms that may be obtained on application to the Secretary of the University. Hart, Schaffner and Marx prizes of $1,000, $500, $300, and $200 for the four best studies in the economic field submitted by June 1, 1925. Particulars in June WRITER. Prizes amounting to $50,000 offered by Liberty and the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation for a thrilling story of love and action suitable for Liberty and a motion picture, contest closing June 1. Particulars in April WRITER. Prize of $1,000 offered by Elizabeth Marbury for two or three acts to complete the one-act play by Sir James Barrie, entitled "Shall We Join the Ladies?" contest closing July 1. Particulars in April WRITER. Prize of $50 offered by the Harvard School of Education at Harvard University for an official song. Particulars in February, 1924, WRITER. Prize of $25 for the best poem published in the Mesa during 1925. Particulars in March WRITER. The Canadian Bookman (125 Simcoe street, Toronto, Canada) offers each month three prizes in a book review competition. Prize of $2,500, to be awarded in 1925 and every three years thereafter, and an annual prize of $300, offered by the Chicago Trust Company for the best contribution on any subject relating to business development and the modern trust company. Particulars in March WRITER. Annual poetry prize of $100 offered by the Nation, poems to be submitted between Thanksgiving Day and New Year's Day of each year. Particulars in February, 1923, WRITER. Prizes of the Poetry Society of South Carolina; Blindman Prize of $250; Southern Prize of $100; Society's Prize of $25; Henry E. Harman Prize of $25 Sky Lark Prize of $10 all offered annually. Particulars in January, 1923, WRITER. Three prizes of $50 each for poems published in the Lyric West during 1925. Particulars in March WRITER. Monthly prizes offered by the Photo-Era Magazine (Wolfeboro, N. H.) for photographs, in an advanced competition and a beginner's competition. Walker prizes for the best memoirs on Natural History, offered annually by the Boston Society of Natural History, closing March 1 of each calendar year. Particulars in June WRITER. Prize of $100 offered by the Drama League of America for the best play suited to children, contest closing August 1. Particulars in January WRITER. American Humane Association prizes of $25. $15, and $10, for posters, contest closing June 1. Particulars in January WRITER. Weekly prizes offered by the Boston Post for original short stories by women, published each day. Particulars in May WRITER. WRITERS OF THE [DAY. 66 Richard Connell, who wrote the story, Six Reasons Why," printed in the Century for April, is thirty-one years old, was born in Poughkeepsie, N. Y., and was graduated from Harvard College in 1915. He was a reporter and a writer of advertising matter before he began to write fiction. He has had many stories published in the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, the Red Book, the Century, and other magazines. His story, "A Friend of Napoleon" won the second O. Henry prize in 1923, and he has had three collections of his stories published: 'The Sin of Monsieur Pettipon," in 1922 ; "Apes and Angels," in 1924; and "Variety," in 1925. Mr. Connell says that Six Reasons Why" is an “ideal” story, or a story with a thesis to state, a story designed to have an intellectual rather than an emotional appeal. Many of his stories are of this type. “Light tragedies," he calls. them, that is, 'the setting of a serious theme against a comedic background." Mr. Connell lives at Green's Farms, Connecticut, in the summer, and in New York or Paris in the winter. Ethel Romig Fuller, whose poem, "Wild Geese," appeared in Sunset for March, has been writing poetry for only two years. She was born in Big Rapids, Michigan, where she lived until after her marriage. Since then she has made her home at Portland, Oregon, where she is an active member of the Northwest Poetry Society. Mrs. Fuller has had considerable success as a magazine feature writer, and her poems have been published in the Garden Magazine (now the Garden Magazine and Home Builder ), the Flower Grower, American Forests and Forest Life, the Youth's Companion, Sunset, the Overland Monthly (now the Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine), the Epworth Herald, the Christian Century, the Buccaneer, the Lyric West, the Lariat, the Muse and Mirror, trade magazines, children's magazines, and newspapers. An "Anthology of Sea Sonnets," published by Erskine McDonald, Ltd., London, included a sonnet by Mrs. Fuller, and she will also have a group of verses in the "Anthology of Western Verse," compiled by Mrs. Mabel Holmes Parsons, of Portland, and published this spring by Dodd, Mead, & Co. Mrs. Jay Gelzer, author of the story, "Leavesin the Breeze," which came out in the March issue of Good Housekeeping, is English by birth, American by adoption. Her mother died suddenly in an American hotel when she was eighteen months old, and she was adopted` by the woman physician of the hotel, who had been a casual friend of her mother, and was then taken to St. Louis, where she grew up. Mrs. Gelzer's first published work appeared in the Green Book (no longer published) about eight years ago, and since then her short stories Hearst's (now merged as the InternationalCosmopolitan), Good Housekeeping, Farm and Fireside, the Country Gentleman, Everybody's, the Woman's World, Munsey's, and quite an extended group of English magazines. She has also had two books published, a collection of Chinese-English stories published under the title, "The Street of a Thousand Delights," and a first novel, entitled "Compromise," now being made into a motion-picture. From one of her stories the motion-picture “Driven" was made, and at the present time she has several other stories being filmed. "Driven" is now being prepared for the stage by a noted dramatist. Mrs. Gelzer, who is the mother of two young sons, lives in St. Louis, spending part of each year in New York, and part in Hollywood. 66 John H. Hamlin, whose serial, Beloved Acres," is now running in the Youth's Companion, says that he has been writing seriously for only about five years. During his student days at the University of Nevada he did a little writing for juvenile papers, but as he could not earn enough to keep himself going he was forced to do other work. He went to San Francisco and, after striving for a year to sell enough to make a living, he went to a big cattle ranch in northern California, where he worked through the haying season, running a mowing machine, driving a team, and, later in the fall, riding with the cowboys in the roundup. It was such a marvelous ranch and the owners took so little interest in it that the plot germ of "Beloved Acres" was suggested to him. He submitted a hastily drafted sketch of the bare outlines of the serial to the Companion, to which he had previously sold three short stories, and receiving an encouraging reply from the corresponding editor set to work on the story. He says that after typing the title, which came to him at the outset, it took him just seventeen days to compose the first draft, revamp and rewrite the finished copy, and put the manuscript in the mail. Mr. Hamlin does all his work directly on the typewriter, and says that his output varies, as well as his methods, but that he does not wait for inspiration. He endeavors to write at least a thousand words a day, and when he is absorbed in a story he frequently writes from 2,500 to 4,000 words daily until the manuscript is fin ished. Then with a friend he reads over the rough chapters and discusses them. If he disagrees with the friend's criticisms, he nevertheless rewrites his own version to strengthen it, more often finding the criticisms sound. Mr. Hamlin says a writer is often blind to his own faults, and needs criticism from the viewpoint of an interested outsider who is not afraid deliver straight-arm punches" at the weak parts of a yarn, since it is sharp and constructive criticism that helps. Every summer he goes back to this same ranch and knocks about with the ranchers and cowboys, gathering his material at first hand. Then he establishes himself for the winter and spring either in San Francisco or in Marin County, and writes up the gleanings of the summer in story form. He has had stories in the Argosy, the Western Story Magazine, the People's Home Journal, and the Complete Story Magazine, and the Century Company will publish 'Beloved Acres in book form early next fall. to Carlotta Oddie, whose story, "Into the Fire," was published in the March Sunset, has been writing rather spasmodically, she says since her University of California days, when a reader in her freshman English course told her with a wide, pleased grin that there was a distinct "kick" in her stories. Miss Oddie finds an intense pleasure in the creation of stories; she has also found the necessity of putting hard work into it. She has had stories published in Sunset, Munsey's, Brief Stories, and Real Life Stories (not now published), and she recently won a prize in a contest of 'The Woman's Viewpoint." CURRENT LITERARY TOPICS. No Formula for Success in Fiction. - It is sometimes said that a "good subject" for a short story should always be capable of being expanded into a novel, The principle may be defendable in special cases; but it is certainly a misleading one on which to build any general theory. Every "subject" (in the novelist's sense of the term) must necessarily contain within itself its own dimensions; and one of the fictionwriter's essential gifts is that of discerning whether the subject which presents itself to him, asking for incarnation, is suited to the proportions of a short story or of a novel. If it appears to be adapted to both, the chances are that it is inadequate to either. It would be as great a mistake, however, to try to base a hard-and-fast theory on the denial of the rule as on its assertion. Instances of short stories made out of subjects that could have been expanded into a novel, and that are yet typical short stories and not mere stunted novels, will occur to every one. General rules in art are useful chiefly as a lamp in a mine, or a handrail down a black stairway; they are necessary for the sake of the guidance they give, but it is a mistake, once they are formulated, to be too much in awe of them.-Edith Wharton, in April Scribner's. The Business of Being a Novelist. Men as a rule write better novels than women, not because of superior aptitudes or brain power but because they carry business methods into their writing, says Mrs. Harriet Comstock. Novels do not "just grow" like Topsy of old, she insists, but most women writers have seemed to think so. "Writing has always been a business, but until lately women have tried to carry it on along lines quite different from those of other professions and as if it were not subject to the rules or regulations of business," says Mrs. Comstock. "With men, this has not been so. Once they adopted writing as a profession, they applied to it the common-sense rules of other occupations, and this accounts principally for the difference in quality between the writing of men and that of women. It is not a question of sex and superior brain power at all, but the lack of organization on the one hand and the force of it on the other. "No woman can write when and where she can, with very little concentration and with. always an eye and ear open for outside and disturbing interruptions. She must devote to her writing the time and concentration that any other profession demands if she is to make a success." BOOK REVIEWS. PERSONAL SHORTHAND. By Godfrey Dewey. 199 pp. A practical knowledge of shorthand will save any writer most of the drudgery of writing, but it is a hard task to master any of the systems that are used for verbatim reporting. In this book Mr. Dewey presents a system of "personal" shorthand, for general non-professional use, which he says can be learned with less expenditure of time and effort than any other efficient system and will enable any writer to save one-half or two-thirds of his time and three-quarters of his effort. Personal Shorthand notes, he says, need never be transcribed, for they can be easily read at any time by any Personal Shorthand writer. The principle of the system is to write by sound, disregarding spelling, using both short vowel signs and longer consonant signs in their proper order, with a few contractions and fewer than fifty word-signs, mostly obvious, for some of the commonest words of English, which make up more than thirty-three per cent. of all writing. "In original or creative work of any kind," Mr. Dewey says, "Personal Shorthand has a value, in the preservation of ideas which would escape a slower pen, less tangible than the savings of time and effort but often far transcending both." The text-book is supplemented with "Personal Shorthand Exercises," published in note-book form, and "Personal Shorthand Reader No. 1," giving the text of "Rip Van Winkle," with key in phonetic print. COLLOQUIAL ITALIAN. By Arthur L. Hayward. 136pp. Cloth. New York : E. P. Dutton & Co. 1925. This book is intended, not for students of Dante or readers of d'Annunzio, but for those travelers and others who want to learn to speak everyday Italian with sufficient fluency to carry on a conversation with Italian-speaking persons. It does not pretend to be an exhaustive treatise on the Italian language, but it does cover every grammatical rule of importance and it makes the student acquainted with common colloquial terms and modes of speech that have been excluded from formal grammars. It begins, after an Introduction, with a simple but adequate chapter on pronun- An endowment of $5,000,000 is sought for the fund of the Authors' League of America for the relief of stricken or aged authors. In the ten years since the fund was incorporated, says George Creel, the president of the League, it has distributed more than $30,000. "The activities of the fund," he says, come under three classifications - pensions, loans, and reeducation. The pensions are extended to aged or permanently disabled authors. The recipients are not simply accepting support, they are writers who have written marketable stuff and are continuing to do so, but because of circumstances are unable to produce sufficient copy to enable them to live. Therefore, in assigning them a regular amount on which to exist while they continue their professions the fund is carrying out its policy of helping people help themselves. The same applies to the loans. They are made without publicity, interest, or security, to tide over a period of illness or placate a landlord, and although the fund never presses for payment they are always repaid. Our policy of re-education especially concerns widows of authors. We believe it more satisfactory, in place of merely presenting the widows and dependents with a check, to find a vocation for which they are suited as to talent and congeniality, and train them for it. Sometimes it takes a rather large amount of money and time, but the results justify it." The will of James Lane Allen provides for the erection of a fountain in Lexington, Kentucky, to be known as "The Children's Fountain of Youth." Statistics compiled for the April number of the International Book Review show that 9,012 books were published in America during 1924. Fiction, as usual, was far in the lead, having a total of 1,226 volumes. However, about 350 of these were new editions, so the total is not so large as it sounds. There were actually 871 new novels brought out by American publishers during the year. Of the 1,226 novels, old and new, in 1924, 846 were by American authors and 270 by foreign authors. The year brought 809 new books in theology and religion, 731 in poetry and drama, 645 in science, 538 in juvenile literature, 521 in sociology and economics, 518 in biography, and 502 in history. |