While at Annapolis he stood among the first five or six in his class. He also reorganized the crew and was captain for a year. He likewise played a good game of football. Fencing, tennis, and horseback riding are his favorite sports. For awhile after graduation he worked on the Army and Navy Journal, and then joined the staff of the Cosmopolitan Magazine. During this time he wrote a great deal; but did not attempt to publish these first experiments in fiction. He married in 1895 and moved not long afterward to his home at Cornish, New Hampshire. Churchill was very fortunate. He did not have to earn a living by doing hackwork, and could take plenty of time with anything that he wrote. It is said that genius is the capacity for taking great pains. Winston Churchill surely illustrates this adage. Hard work, determination, and a keen sense of values made him the successful novelist that he is. He was ambitious to write the very best he knew how. Once, when living in St. Louis, he hired an office and went down to it as regularly as any other man of business. His writing was business, and was treated as such. He rewrote “Richard Carvel” at least five times. He worked from breakfast until one o’clock, after lunch for two or three hours, and after dinner often far into the night. This, the first of three of Winston Churchill’s novels dealing with American history, became the most popular book in the United States. “The Crisis,” the second of these historical novels, appeared a few years after “Richard Carvel,” and in 1904 “The Crossing,” the last of the trilogy, was published. The background for “The Crisis” was the Civil War, and “The Crossing” dealt with the great western movement across the country. Churchill has served in the New Hampshire legislature, and also ran for the governorship of that state. “Coniston” was a direct outgrowth of his political associations. The novel is a story of politics, with a charming love story running through it. Winston Churchill is still a young man, and there is every reason to believe that his best and biggest work is still to come. [Illustration: OWEN WISTER] Owen Wister, a drawer of real, vital characters, is the subject of one of the six intaglio-gravure pictures illustrating “American Novelists.” OWEN WISTER Monograph Number Six in The Mentor Reading Course It is remarkable how many successful writers get into literature by accident. Very few novelists begin by taking up writing as a profession: most of them drift into it from other fields. Owen Wister was no exception to this. He settled down in Philadelphia to practise law; but the call of the pen was too strong for him. He was thirty-one years old before he began to write.