Mrs. Howard's Hunch

"Is good pay to be author?" asks the Norwegian father in Broadway's current hit I Remember Mama. "For magazines," answers all-wise Mama, "I think maybe yes. For books I think no."

On the whole, Mama is right. Except for the rare few which become bestsellers, novels are not big moneymakers. First novels seldom do more than pay publication costs. Yet writers go on dreaming of striking it rich--and sometimes it happens, as it just did to a plump, middle-aged Florida housewife whose first novel brought her $145,000 before publication.

The lucky author is Mrs. Elizabeth Metzger Howard, 45, wife of a British-born mining engineer. Her novel Before the Sun Goes Down, a story of a Pennsylvania town in the 1880s, will be published early next year--as the winner of both the $20,000 Doubleday, Doran Novel Contest and the $125,000 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Annual Novel Award. The $145,000 is not the end of Mrs. Howard's windfall. M.G.M. will pay her up to $50,000 more if her book becomes a best-seller --and may offer her a writing contract to boot.

Mrs. Howard made her living as a pulp writer for ten years. But since marrying and settling down in Winter Haven, Fla. in 1931, her total literary income has been $6.50--for an article in a trade magazine on her favorite thesis of "If you can't write what you want, why write at all?" Her double bonanza did not overwhelm her. Said she: "You never know. I had a feeling this might be my year for making $100,000."

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