THEODORE DREISER
It was along the road of anonymity that Basil King finally found the way to pronounced success. In “Griselda,” “Let Not Man Put Asunder,” “In the Garden of Charity,” “The Steps of Honor,” and “The Giant’s Strength” he had won recognition as an accomplished story-teller. But still his audience was a comparatively limited one. Then, in 1910, appeared “The Inner Shrine,” a story of Franco-American life. It was read from one end of the land to the other, and greatly piqued curiosity as to the authorship, which, for many months, was carefully concealed. A dozen different names were suggested and accepted before it became an open secret that the story was the work of Basil King. The success of “The Inner Shrine” was perhaps largely responsible for the success of the subsequent “The Wild Olive” and “The Street Called Straight.”
From photograph, copyright by Paul Thompson, N. Y.
JESSE LYNCH WILLIAMS
In by-gone years it was Brand Whitlock, the Mayor of Toledo; in recent times it has been Brand Whitlock, the American Minister to Belgium, that has obscured Brand Whitlock, novelist. Yet despite the height he has attained in the fields of politics and of diplomacy, he is, and is likely always to remain, at heart a man of letters. Some day it may be given to him to “write the book as he sees it, for the God of things as they are.” Meanwhile he claims recognition here on the basis of such works of fiction as “The Thirteenth District,” “The Happy Average,” “The Turn of the Balance,” and “The Gold Brick,” a collection of short stories that appeared in 1910.
Campbell studios, N. Y.
LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
Samuel Hopkins Adams’ first essay in the field of sustained fiction was “The Mystery,” written in 1905, in collaboration with Stewart Edward White. The following year appeared “The Flying Death,” a tale of Montauk Point. Subsequent novels by Mr. Adams have been “Average Jones,” “The Secret of Lonesome Cave,” “Little Miss Grouch,” and “The Clarion,” the last named being a story involving newspaper life and the sinister influence of the tainted money of patent medicine advertisers on the liberty of the press.