The Women Who Make Our Novels

“I have here a letter from Mr. Latham of Macmillans with a very complimentary request from you for data regarding myself. There really is not much to say about me as a person. T...

It is the very question Mary Johnston herself has been asking these twenty years, ever since _Prisoners of Hope_ announced to the world the advent of a new American writer, a wo...

Ellen Glasgow’s first two books were produced before she was twenty. She is a Virginian, like Mary Johnston, but a realist--better, a disciple of naturalism--and concerned with...

To write twenty-six books is something, is it not? To have written twenty-six books which have sold half a million copies (the publisher’s offhand guess) is something else again...

Nothing is so satisfactory to write about as a novelist with ideas; but in writing about Mrs. Honoré Willsie we shall not discuss her ideas. It will be enough to try faithfully...

“I am being very frank,” exclaims Mary Roberts Rinehart. As if she ever were otherwise! “I have never had any illusions about the work I do. I am, frankly, a story-teller. Some...

Some novelists are at their best in their first novels; others do their best work after a long apprenticeship in the public eye; a few show steady growth and a very few show ste...

Enclosed you will find the biographical sketch of my life and some account of my work, in reply to your request for the same. I have no doubt that you can get some expression of...

In the pleasant old town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is a fourth (top floor) apartment and above it a roof garden. Come up on the roof. “Fresh, clean light canvas, framed...

Because Gene Stratton-Porter cares for the truth that is in her, she is the most widely read and most widely loved author in America to-day, with the probable exception of Harol...

Gertrude Atherton has been the subject of more controversy than any other living American novelist. It is one of the best evidences of her importance. England, we are told, rega...

“It has been almost impossible for me to write this. I have made a dozen beginnings and invariably found myself drifting off into reminiscences of my childhood and funny lies ab...

They rise before dawn, gentle souls who find peace in the labor of their hands and in their astonishing faith. They are the silent companions of their husbands. People do not ta...

A chapter on Helen R. Martin can hardly be anything but a prolonged interview, or a pieced interview, somewhat like a patchwork quilt, constructed from talks of various persons...

The real Anna Katharine Green is a terrible mystery. We do not mean Mrs. Charles Rohlfs of 156 Park Street, Buffalo, whose husband is an expert maker of fine furniture and who w...

Half a dozen plays and half a hundred stories stand to the credit of Frances Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester, England, naturalized as an American citizen in 1905 or thereabo...

“Mrs. Norris,” explains William Dean Howells, “puts the problem, or the fact, or the trait before you by quick, vivid touches of portraiture or action. If she lacks the final to...

“But I see them; they are coming, still coming. O, so many little ones; they are clinging to you; you are surrounded by them,” the woman declared, her eyes on the ball. “They ar...

The order of authors in this book is accidental and the circumstance that the first chapter of the book is upon Edith Wharton is also accidental, also and therefore; which is to...

Edith Wharton, at 56, does a work of mercy in France; Margaret Deland is similarly engaged at 61. That speaks so much more loudly than their books. And their books are not silent.

“The first story which I ever wrote was printed. I printed it myself, in pencil, for it was before I could write. And the story appeared in a book. I made the book, of manilla p...

should be and leave it to the people as to what kind of book they will take into their hearts and homes.” I altered _Freckles_ slightly, but from that time on we worked on this...

On March 17, 1918, the author of this book had the pleasure, as editor of _Books and the Book World_ of _The Sun_, New York, of printing what is certainly the best account extan...

“I have been too busy in legitimate ways--gardening, cooking, cursing the Hun--to write you a human document. But these are some of the dark facts. I was born in Hampton Falls,...

Of course Marjorie Benton Cooke is Bambi, or, if you prefer, Bambi is simply Marjorie Benton Cooke. The heroine of the most amusing novel by an American woman in many, many year...

There are two actresses who are never interviewed--Alla Nazimova and Maude Adams. At least that was true some years ago; perhaps it is no longer true of Nazimova. But did you ev...

There have been, and are, those who doubt whether anything good can come out of Greenwich Village. It would possibly be unfair to cite Mary Heaton Vorse as an answer to these do...

Why do some of Grace S. Richmond’s books sell faster than the books of any other American woman writer? Because they do! And their popularity has no relation whatever to their s...

After a novel has met the demand for it in the regular edition the plates from which it is printed are turned over to Grosset & Dunlap or some other publishing house which issue...

Eleanor Hallowell Abbott (Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Coburn: Mrs. Fordyce Coburn) is the most fanciful writer in America to-day. Fanciful, inventive--not imaginative in the large...

It is the commendable but not always fruitful practice of the publishing house of Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, to send to all its authors a folder calling for such particul...

The author of _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ was born in 1870 in a big old country house at Shelbyville, Kentucky, the home of her grandfather, Judge Caldwell. Her name was,...

Mrs. Fisher is, we think, the only novelist of whose work we shall say nothing. Why? Because it “speaks for itself”? Certainly not. Every one’s work does that. No, because it do...

If Alice Duer Miller would only express herself with a lofty obscurity she would be a Distinguished Author and if she would only write about a different kind of people she would...

Both as a short story writer and as a novelist her work is unimportant, largely ephemeral and extremely overrated. Ephemerality in itself does not matter; most things are epheme...

The most interesting thing about Edna Ferber is that she was born in Kalamazoo. No, the most interesting thing is that she threw her first novel in the wastebasket whence, like...

This book, the rather unpremeditated production of several months’ work, is by a man who is not a novelist and who is therefore entirely unfitted to write about women who are no...