Katherine Mayo was born in Ridgway, Pennsylvania, but she was educated at private schools in Boston and Cambridge, and her home has long been in New York City.
She is a contributor to our best periodicals, The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's, The North American, The Outlook, and The Saturday Evening Post. Her stories are almost all founded on facts. The story "John G." in this collection of short stories is selected from The Standard Bearers, which is a group of true narratives concerning the Pennsylvania State Police. These tales are told by Miss Mayo in a finely distinctive way which makes vivid the gallant deeds of these brave men.
Miss Mayo's interest in the history and deeds of the Pennsylvania State Police was aroused by her personal experience of the helplessness of country districts in New York state to prevent or punish crime. Miss Mayo had heard that Pennsylvania years ago had acknowledged its duty to protect all its people, and to that end had established a rural patrol known as the State Police. Finding little in print concerning this force, she went to Pennsylvania to study the facts first hand.
The results of her investigations she published early in 1917 in her book, Justice to All, with an introduction by ex-President Roosevelt, in which he declares the volume to be so valuable that it should be in every public library and every school-library in the land.
In The Standard Bearers, she tells of some of the special feats of early members of that now famous force. No detective stories, no tales of the Wild West can exceed in thrilling human interest these true narratives of events that have happened in our own time and in our own country.
Miss Mayo during the world war has done active work over seas in the "Y." True stories of her experiences with the doughboys have appeared in The North American, and in The Outlook.
John G.
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68, 1. Barrack-Room Ballads. Poems by Rudyard Kipling with the atmosphere of the far East.