Books: Best-Seller

EXIT—Harold Bell Wright—Appleton ($2).

No Philistine, Author Harold Bell Wright has read Shakespeare and marked him. From As You Like It he derived a thought: that all the world’s a stage.

Old Antonio Latour, one of Mr. Wright’s heroes, was once an actor, then retired to be the harmless reprobate of his native Midwestern small town. He had loved, but in vain, Harriet Noel—she who might have been one of the world’s great actresses had it not been for her villain husband and her darling son, for whose future stage career she gladly sacrificed her own. Young son Pierre, too soon an orphan, had been brought up by old Tony to fulfill his mother’s dreams.

Pierre too, alas, loved (and in vain) a girl of his own home town. When Ann married his rival, Pierre cut a caper to hide his bleeding heart, took a job as soda-jerker to study character, saved his pay for his triumphal journey to Manhattan. On the eve of Pierre’s departure old Tony appeared with a play he had written, read it to newly-married Ann. Tony’s play, in Seven Keys to Baldpate style, goes on with the story from that point. It shows Pierre at the last minute sacrificing his career for Ann’s sake, giving his little inheritance and his hard-earned money to Ann’s husband, who sinks it in a wildcat gold mine. There is a murder, a bank robbery, Ann’s husband deserts her, her father is arrested. The scene shifts to a Western desert: Pierre is hotfoot on the missing husband’s trail. He finds him … a gold mine (the great lode of Mother Mountain!) is discovered . . . there is not enough water for two . . . another murder. In the sheriff’s office at Red Butte, Pierre, given up for dead (no man could get through Skeleton Sink alive) stumbles in to confront the sheriff, Ann and old Tony. He dies with a nobly false self-accusation hissing through his parched lips.

Ann, naturally enough, is upset by this play, thinks she realizes, too late, her love for Pierre. Old Tony smiles gently. Says he: “Yes, dear, I know, I know. But the play must go on—always the play must go on.”

Author Wright, anticipating biased criticism from jealous critics, says: “They who pride themselves on being too sophisticated and worldly-wise to indulge in sentiment . . . will laugh with hard laughter . . . will say that Antonio Latour’s story 13 sentimental bosh. . . . Well … I make no claim to literary equality with these sophisticated gentry. But of this I am convinced: All normal men and women who have truly lived to have such emotional memories. . . . No, I have no illusions—I know that I am not so skilled in the art of writing as these proud, unemotional dealers in words. I am only more honest.”

The Author. Well may Harold Bell Wright scorn the critics. Average sale of his twelve novels has been 737,443. Tall, spare, with thinning hair (he is 58), high forehead, long nose, prominent jaw. Author Wright looks more like a preacher than a writer. He used to be a preacher (Christian Disciples) in California, Missouri and Kansas, but retired from pulpiteering proper in 1908, went to Arizona “as a matter of health insurance.” There he still lives, in a Spanish-Mission house near Tucson. He has recently (February) returned from Hawaii, where he worked on Exit, fished for mahimahi from a sampan. Twice married, ex-Preacher Wright has three children, all issue of the first wife.