from People's Home Journal
Ellis Parker Butler
by Ellis Parker Butler
To a suggestion from the Journal that Ellis Parker Butler's photograph appearing on this page, would be of even greater interest to our readers if the gifted author of this month's novelette, "Uncle Redney Breaks Loose," were to tell us something about himself, Mr. Butler graciously submits the following humorous data -- a very complete autobiography:
Butler -- Ellis Parker -- one of the corn-fed Iowa authors, now making valiant efforts to oust Indiana from the position of Best-Seller State in popular literature. Born at Muscatine, on the Mississippi -- one of the best-known rivers in the corn country -- at or during the period when said river was still used as an article of drink. Pathologists, seeking a reason why this otherwise normal person should give up a clean job as bill clerk in a wholesale grocery and come East to plunge into the degraded life of a humorist, have decided the cause to be the drinking of the water of the Mississippi while it was still tinged by memories of Mark Twain. The author of "Pigs is Pigs" secured a humorist's education by:
1st. Leaving High School when he reached Paragraph Page 8, Rule 6, Exception 1, of the Latin grammar.
2d. Assisting in the office of a spice milling and coffee roasting establishment.
3d. Retarding the office work of an oatmeal mill.
4th. Selling Royal Worcester china and Jugtown butter crocks in a retail crockery store.
5th. Urging retail grocers to purchase navy beans and plug tobacco from a wholesale grocery.
6th. Editing, in seven or eight years, 1st, a tailor's journal, 2d, a wall paper magazine, 3d, an upholstery and furniture monthly.
He would have continued right through the list of trades if the publications had only held out, but they didn't.
This course of education could produce nothing but a humorist, and was completed by extended travels, in which Mr. Butler visited Paris; Kalona, Iowa; Brussels; Hackensack, New Jersey; Holland, and Canaan-Four-Corners, Columbia County, New York. The further broad experience of the deeper things of life, needed to permit the author to touch the souls of his readers, was furnished through his having had mumps, twins, measles, membership in the Players' Club, an overdrawn bank account, a year in a New York boarding house, intestinal indigestion and one (1) wife.
