“After graduating from Wisconsin University, about six years were spent in newspaper work, in Milwaukee and New York, and in magazine work in New York--and in that time a master’s degree was given by Wisconsin University for work done in absentia, but neither degree, in itself, has ever meant anything to me, though of course that part of the work which I liked and wanted was invaluable.... I began newspaper work on the Milwaukee _Evening Wisconsin_ which accepted that first story of mine, and I secured a position by attrition. I presented myself every morning at the desk of the city editor to ask for an assignment, but the chief thing that I can recall about those mornings was the intense wish that the elevator which was taking me up to the city room would turn out to be the elevator taking me down again. At the end of two weeks the city editor let me write about a flower show. I have never put such emotion into anything else that I have written. I was another month in getting on the staff. In New York the process was different. After being refused by nearly every paper there, I went back to the New York _World_, and by the office boy every morning I sent in a list of suggestions, made from that day’s news, on which I thought I could write; and the city editor checked those that I might try. After a good many weeks I went on the staff of the _World_. “And all of this was so largely sheer adventure and pioneering that none of it now seems to me to have been either will or purpose, but pure delight. But at the time I was under the illusion that I was very determined. “For the last few years I have lived here with my father and mother, in the little town where I was born and where they have spent most of their lives. My mother’s family, named Beers, is English; and my father’s family, English, of Scotch-Irish descent, settled in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1640, nine generations ago. My great-great-grandfather, Captain Henry Gale, led his company against the courthouse at Worcester, where the supreme court was sitting, and demanded the repeal of the imprisonment-for-debt law, just after the Revolution; and for this he was condemned to death, and then reprieved, and removed to Vermont.... Here in Portage, in my father’s house, a little river runs close by the door, and there are lilacs on the bank and hills to the south, and there are many wild birds, and squirrels live in trees close to the windows. It is true that people love to try to make their own surroundings sound romantic and unique, and hereby, to my own taste, I do so. Here I have written ten books of fiction, two published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company and all the rest by the Macmillan Company; and a little play, _Neighbors_, published by Huebsch.