Arthur Train

The Great Business Man Fictionized?

One of the most difficult of tasks for a writer is that of changing the public's opinion of him. It is true not only of writers. The clown is forever wanting to play poet. The great decision that many writers, young and old, must make, do make, is to throw over everything in favor of a career of purely creative writing. The metamorphosis of writing from avocation to vocation is apt to involve many pains, bodily as well as mental. I know one boy who has given up the life of a sailor to write poetry. He goes without meals to carry out his ambition. Another, unwilling to let his wife go hungry, works by the hour in a shirt-waist factory, reserving enough hours to finish his plays. Success may crown their efforts ; it may not.

Arthur Train's double decision, to give up law and to change his style of writing, was a difficult one to make. That he has been successful is simply a proof of a determination to succeed which has followed him through life. Having written many books in spare hours, having become known as a writer of stories of law, lawyers, crime, its detection and of humor, he found himself at middle age determined to break with his habits of life and to become a sort of American Galsworthy. He wrote, therefore, His Children's Children,* which caught critical and public fancy. He has followed it with several other books, among them, The Needle's Eye/- and Marriage `a la Mode, about to appear serially.

I like Mr. Train's attitude toward his writing. He knows life as only a good lawyer can: His books are in the nature of problems. He plans them, attacks them, carries them to completion, as lie would brief and carry through a case. His books are now popular.

When you meet him in the comfortable study of his New York home, you meet the successful lawyer, son of a former Attorney-General of Massachusetts, quiet, reserved, positive, the man you can easily visualize as he must have looked when he took his position as prosecuting attorney. This personality he now gives to letters with the same quiet determination. He is still young; and the shelf of his own books is already large. He has written wisely of American society and business. There is no reason why he should not some day write that penetrating study of the great American business man which has yet to be put within pages. In "Uncle Shiras" of The Needle's Eye he foreshadowed this. Such a novel burns to he written!

J.F

*His CHILDREN'S CHILDREN -- Scribner ($2.00). (TIME, Mar. 24, 1923.)

/-THE NEEDLE'S EYE -- Scribner ($2.00). (TiME, Oct. 6.)