"I write my fiction as you do advertising copy – to make a living at it. But I have tried to save enough of myself out of the hurly-burly to do the stuff that counts in the end."
Arthur Stringer loved letters and somehow figured out a way to make them pay. A journalist, poet, novelist, and short story writer, he produced sixty books in his seventy-six years. "Stringer was no mere formula writer of commercial fiction,"
Clarence Karr notes. "Refusing to be typecast, he varied his genres and the settings, and at times, pushed the frontiers of literature beyond the point of easy acceptance for publishers and editors." Stringer was also one of Hollywood's earliest screenwriters, demonstrating such ease and adaptability that friend and fellow Ontarian Mary Pickford called him "Chameleon".
We've forgotten the man, his talent, and the fact that he was an extremely generous gent. Here he shares a priceless formula with 1904 readers of The Bookman:
Do take note – after all, the revival of the society novel is decades overdue.
Should be any day now.
I'm all set.
