Books by Mary E. Waller
Little Citizens, 1902.
A Daughter of the Rich, 1903.
The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus, 1904.
Sanna of the Island Town, 1905.
Through the Gates of the Netherlands, 1906.
A Year Out of Life, 1909.
Our Benny, 1909.
Flamsted Quarries, 1910.
My Ragpicker, 1911.
A Cry in the Wilderness, 1912.
Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart, 1913.
From an Island Outpost, 1914.
Out of the Silences, 1918.
Little Citizens was published by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company, Boston; Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart was published by Miss Waller; all Miss Waller’s other books are published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston.
CHAPTER XXXIV
ZONA GALE
MY dear Mr. Overton:—
“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 paper, bound with ribbon. The story began: ‘The sun was just sinking behind the western hills when three travelers appeared. One was tall and one was short and one was middle-sized.’ And when the heroine arrived and one of these travelers asked her to marry him, I remember pressing my mother to tell me how to spell ‘N—yes’, which constituted the maid’s reply.
“At about the same time I wrote a volume of verse in a blank book. One selection was this:
When I am a lady, a lady
I will be a milliner if I can.
I’ll have pretty flowers and bonnets and hats
And in my store there shall be no mice and rats,
When I am a lady.
“When I was thirteen I wrote a novel, which almost simultaneously came back to me from a publisher. It was called A White Dove, but I do not know what it was about. A few years later I wrote another novel, Vedita, of tremendous length—this is easy to remember because of the cost of the type-writing. It was submitted to a Chicago newspaper which was offering a prize for a serial. From that manuscript, which was readily returned, I saved alive the character of Nichola, an old Italian servant, whom I later used in The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre.
“A short story I first submitted at sixteen—it was called Both, was three thousand words long, and I was paid Three Dollars for it by the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin. I had just entered the University at Madison, forty miles from my home, but I traveled the forty miles and came home to show the check, and went back in two hours. Excepting in the Milwaukee and Madison and Wisconsin University newspapers, and one or two evanescent magazines, I never had a story accepted until 1903, though for ten years previous to that acceptance, by Success Magazine, I had constantly submitted stories. In 1911 the Delineator gave me a first prize of $2,000 for a short story, The Ancient Dawn. In 1904 I began writing stories about Pelleas and Ettarre, two old lovers, and forty of these were published in a dozen magazines, and half were collected in a volume published by the Macmillan Company. These were followed by Friendship Village stories. The first editor to whom these stories were submitted declined them with the word that his acquaintance with small towns was wide but that he had never seen any such people as these. About sixty of these stories have been published serially, the majority of them now collected in four volumes, but I am still not sure that the first editor was not right.