I was born in Emporia, Kansas, February 10, 1868, when Emporia was a pioneer village a hundred miles from a railroad. My father came to Emporia in 1859 and my mother in 1855. She was a pioneer school teacher and he a pioneer doctor. She was pure bred Irish, and he of Yankee lineage since 1639. When I was a year old, Emporia became too effete for my parents, and they moved to El Dorado, Kansas. There I grew up. El Dorado was a town of a dozen houses, located on the banks of the Walnut, a sluggish, but a clear and beautiful prairie stream, rock bottom, and spring fed. I grew up in El Dorado, a prairie village boy; went to the large stone school house that "reared its awful form" on the hill above the town before there were any two-story buildings in the place. In 1884, I was graduated from the town high school, and went to the College of Emporia for a year; worked a year as a printer's devil; learned something of the printer's trade; went to school for another year, working in the afternoons and Saturdays at the printer's case; became a reporter on the _Emporia News_; later went to the State University for three years. After more or less studying and working on the Lawrence papers, I went back to El Dorado as manager of the _El Dorado Republican_ for State Senator T. B. Murdock. From the _El Dorado Republican_, I went to Kansas City to work for the _Kansas City Journal_, and at 24 became an editorial writer on the _Kansas City Star_. For three years I worked on the _Star_, during which time I married Miss Sallie Lindsay, a Kansas City, Kansas, school teacher. In 1895 I bought the _Emporia Gazette_ on credit, without a cent in money, and chiefly with the audacity and impudence of youth. It was then a little paper; I paid three thousand dollars for it, and I have lived in Emporia ever since. In 1896, I published a book of short stories called _The Real Issue_; in 1899, another book of short stories called _The Court of Boyville_. In 1901, I published a third book of short stories called _Stratagems and Spoils_; in 1906, _In Our Town_. In 1909, I published my first novel, _A Certain Rich Man_. In 1910, I published a book of political essays called _The Old Order Changeth_; in 1916, a volume of short stories entitled _God's Puppets_. A volume half novel and half travel sketches called _The Martial Adventures of Henry & Me_ filled the gap between my two novels; and the second novel, _In the Heart of a Fool_ was published in 1918.