Quotes

I was born in Rensselaer and lived there until I was thirteen, when my father, fifty-seven, retired, sold his newspaper, and became a fruit-grower in beautiful Rogue River Valley in Oregon. But frost, hail, wind, blight, San Jose scale, codling moth (all terms of horror to me to this day) and the tantrums of the market brought the sheriff on to our front porch. He did not actually get inside, but the cold wind of poverty rattled the windows and gave us the scare of our lives. I resolved that whatever I did in life, first and foremost it must make us a bountiful living.

Living in Augusta, Georgia, not only out of the world but out of my times, avoiding New York, Hollywood, and all contacts and pressures that could breach my dreams (a social delinquent if one ever was), reading poetry and biography but no novels but my own, fishing or shooting three days a week with a soft-voiced, dark-skinned attendant-companion, I hope to write vigorously for two more decades. If so, I will have made something like a record--more than fifty years of good living from my pen alone, and a long lifetime spent at absolutely no other (except a year's soldiering) gainful occupation.

Heaving a happy sigh, I got back to the typewriter early in 1919. That year I wrote 'The Elephant Remembers,' which may be the most widely-read story in English written in this century (it was in "Literature and Life" and other school-text books by the score, so that uncounted millions of students could not get out of reading it) and 'The Heart of Little Shikara,' which won the O. Henry Memorial Prize in 1921.