Recollections of a Varied Life

by George Cary Eggleston

While Edward was absorbed in the writing of "The Hoosier Schoolmaster" and its quickly following successor, "The End of the World," he more and more left the editorial conduct of the paper to me, and presently he resigned his editorial place, leaving me as his successor.

The work was of a kind that awakened all my enthusiasm. My tastes were literary rather than journalistic, whatever may have been the case as to my capacities, and in the conduct of Hearth and Home my work was far more literary in character than any that had fallen to me up to that time in my service on daily newspapers. More important still, it brought me into contact, both personally and by correspondence, with practically all the active literary men and women of that time, with many of whom I formed friendships that have endured to this time in the case of those who still live, and that ended only with the death of those who are gone. The experiences and the associations of that time were both delightful and educative, and I look back upon them after all these years with a joy that few memories can give me. I was a mere apprentice to the literary craft, of course, but I was young enough to enjoy and, I think, not too conceited to feel the need of learning all that such associations could teach.

It was during this Hearth and Home period that my first books were written and published. They were the results of suggestions from others rather than of my own self-confidence, as indeed most of the thirty-odd books I have written have been.

Mr. George P. Putnam, the Nestor of American book publishing, the friend of Washington Irving and the discoverer of his quality, returned to the work of publishing about that time. In partnership with his son, George Haven Putnam, then a young man and now the head of a great house, he had set up a publishing firm with a meager "list" but with ambition to increase it to a larger one.

My First Book

In that behalf the younger member of the firm planned a series of useful manuals to be called "Putnam's Handy Book Series," and to be sold at seventy-five cents each. With more of hopefulness than of discretion, perhaps, he came to me asking if I could not and would not write one or two of the little volumes. The immediate result was a little book entitled "How to Educate Yourself."

In writing it I had the advantage of comparative youth and of that self-confident omniscience which only youth can have. I knew everything then better than I know anything now, so much better indeed that for a score of years past I have not dared open the little book, lest it rebuke my present ignorance beyond my capacity to endure.

Crude as the thing was, it was successful, and it seems to have satisfied a genuine need, if I may judge by the numberless letters sent to me by persons who felt that it had helped them. Even now, after the lapse of more than thirty-eight years, such letters come to me occasionally from men in middle life who say they were encouraged and helped by it in their youth. I once thought of rewriting it with more of modesty than I possessed when it had birth, but as that would be to bring to bear upon it a later-acquired consciousness of ignorance rather than an enlarged knowledge of the subject, I refrained, lest the new version should be less helpful than the old.

The Rev. Dr. Theodore L. Cuyler once said to me:

"If one gets printer's ink on his fingers when he is young, he can never get it off while he lives." The thought that suggested that utterance had prompt illustration in this case. Not long after this poor little first book was published, I went to Boston to secure literary contributions for Hearth and Home. In those days one had to go to Boston for such things. Literary activity had not yet transferred its dwelling place to New York, nor had Indiana developed its "school."