Mrs. Rinehart

She Has Never Written a Failure

Mary Roberts Rinehart's own dramatization of The Breaking Point is now finished. It will soon go into rehearsal. Since December she has written two plays, has made many drafts of each, has discarded one and decided that the other will do. Mrs. Rinehart works swiftly and constantly. Her life has been a succession of amazing successes; but they have come as a result of a genius for understanding the public mind, an acquired ability to write, an unusual executive sense, and a gift for fortune--luck if you like. This luck of Mrs. Rinehart's is not a myth. Shooting, she will bring down a bird on the wing--to her own surprise; fishing, she will be the only one to make a catch.

Forced to earn her own living when she was very young, Mrs. Rinehart became a nurse. In the hospital she met Dr. Rinehart; she was married at nineteen. It was not until after her three sons were born that she started writing. Her first efforts were children's poems, which, she tells you, were exceedingly bad. Then she wrote short stories with some success. Her first novel, The Circular Staircase, which later became The Bat, was a great success, and from that time her progress has been steady. She has never written a failure. That is largely because she respects and knows her tremendous public. Of all our women writers, her attitude toward the war was the sanest, and her Kings, Queens and Pawns is a magnificent piece of reporting. Her work for the Department of Justice was secret, brave and successful. It is characteristic of her that she hates trains, that she arrives from a rail-road journey a nervous wreck; but that she can ride a horse steadily for weeks through the most dangerous western passes.

To meet Mrs. Rinehart in her Washington home is to see a hostess of charm, and to hear a raconteuse of ability. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, she has the rare gift of dramatizing fact so that it has the thrill of a mystery story. Dark, faultlessly dressed, with graceful nervous hands and the deep eyes that are at once penetrating and sympathetic, she is a beautiful and a forceful woman.

What a contrast to step into her study! Piles of mail; manuscripts; a sheaf of speeches for a play here; the beginning of an article there; a pile of invitations on the corner of the desk. Never satisfied, never stopping, Mrs. Rinehart is the indefatigable woman of action.

J. F.