Author of "She Buildeth Her House" and "Routledge Rides Alone"
(Eight Editions)
Well-known as one of the most successful short-story contributors to American magazines, Will Levington Comfort awoke one morning a little over a year ago to find himself famous as a long-story writer. Seldom has the first novel of an author been accorded the very essence of praise from the conservative critics as was Mr. Comfort's "Routledge Rides Alone," acknowledged to be the best book of 1910.
While young in years, Mr. Comfort, who is thirty-three, is old in experience. In 1898 he enlisted in the Fifth United States Cavalry, and saw Cuban service in the Spanish-American War. The following year he rode as a war correspondent in the Philippines a rise which resulted from vivid letters written to newspapers from the battlefields and prisons.
Stricken with fever, wearied of service and thinking of Home, he was next ordered by cable up into China to watch the lid lifted from the Legations at Peking. Here he saw General Liscum killed on the Tientsin Wall and got his earliest glance of the Japanese in war. Another attack of fever completely prostrated him and he was sent home on the hospital ship "Relief."
In the interval between the Boxer Uprising and the Russo-Japanese War, Mr. Comfort began to dwell upon the great fundamental facts of world-politics. But the call of smoke and battle was too strong, and, securing a berth as war-correspondent for a leading midwestern newspaper, he returned to the far East and the scenes of the Russo-Japanese conflict in 1904. He was present at the battle of Liaoyang his description of which in "Routledge Rides Alone" fairly overwhelms the reader.
Few novels of recent years have aroused the same enthusiasm as was evoked by this story of "Routledge." Book reviewers both in this country and in Europe have suggested that the book should win for its author the Peace prize because it is one of the greatest and most effective arguments against warfare that has ever been presented.