STEWART EDWARD WHITE
There are some authors whom we think of as bookmen; there are others whom we think of as men first, and as writers secondarily. Lowell, for example was a bookman; Roosevelt was a man of action who wrote books. Stewart Edward White, far more of a literary artist than Roosevelt, gives like him the impression of a man who has done things, of one who lives a full life, and produces books as a sort of by-product: very valuable, but not the chief end of existence.
Mr. White was born in a small town near Grand Rapids, Michigan, March 12, 1873. His parents had their own ideas about bringing up children. Instead of sending him to school they sent for a teacher to instruct him, they encouraged him to read, they took him traveling, not only to cities but to the silent places, the great forests, and to the lumber camps. He spent four years in California, and became a good horseman, making many trips in the saddle to the picturesque old ranches. When finally, he entered high school, at sixteen, he went in with boys of his own age, and graduated at eighteen, president of his class. And what he was most proud of was that he won and still holds, the five-mile running record of his school. He was intensely interested in birds at this time, and spent all his spare hours in the woods, studying bird-life. The result was a series of articles on birds, published in various scientific journals,—papers whose columns are not usually open to high school contributors.
Then came a college course at the University of Michigan, with vacations spent in cruising about the Great Lakes in a twenty-eight-foot cutter sloop. After graduation he worked for a time in a packing house, then hearing of the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, he set off with the other gold-diggers. He did not find a mine, but the experience gave him a background for two later novels, The Claim Jumpers, and The Westerners.
He went east for a year of graduate study at Columbia University. Like many other students, he found a friend in Professor Brander Matthews, who encouraged him to write of some of his western experiences. He sold a few short stories to magazines, and his first novel, The Claim Jumpers was accepted by Appleton's. The Westerners, his next book, brought him $500 for the serial rights, and with its publication he definitely determined upon making authorship his calling. But it was not authorship in a study. The Blazed Trail was written in a lumber camp in midwinter. He got up at four o'clock, wrote until eight, then put on his snowshoes and went out for a day's work. When the story was finished he gave it to the foreman of the camp to read. The man began it after supper, and when White got up next morning at four, he found him still reading, so he felt that the book would succeed.
Another year he made a trip to the Hudson Bay country, and on his return wrote Conjurer's House. This was dramatized by George Broadhurst, and was very successful on the stage. With Thomas Fogarty, the artist, he made a long canoe trip, and the resulting book, The Forest, was illustrated by Mr. Fogarty. A camping trip in the Sierra Mountains of California was followed by the writing of The Mountains. His next book, The Mystery, was written jointly by Mr. White and Samuel Hopkins Adams. When it was finished they not only divided the proceeds but divided the characters for future stories, White taking Handy Solomon, whom he used again in Arizona Nights, and Darrow, who appeared in The Sign at Six.
Then without warning, Mr. White went to Africa. His explanation was simple:
I went because I wanted to. About once in so often the wheels get rusty and I have to get up and do something real or else blow up. Africa seemed to me a pretty real thing. Let me add that I did not go for material. I never go anywhere for material; if I did I should not get it. That attitude of mine would give me merely externals, which are not worth writing about. I go places merely because for one reason or another they attract me. Then if it happens that I get close enough to the life, I may later find that I have something to write about. A man rarely writes anything convincing unless he has lived the life; not with his critical faculty alert, but whole-heartedly and because, for the time being, it is his life.
Naturally he found that he had something to write about on his return. The Land of Footprints, African Camp Fires, Simba, and The Leopard Woman were books that grew out of his African trip. Mr. White next planned to write a series of three novels dealing with the romantic history of the state of California. The first of these books, Gold, describes the mad rush of the Forty-Niners on the first discovery of gold in California. The Gray Dawn, the second of the series, tells of the days of the Vigilantes, when the wild life of the mining camps slowly settled down to law and order. The coming of the World War was a fresh challenge to his adventurous spirit, and he saw service in France as a major in the U. S. Field Artillery.