George Barr McCutcheon's novels made him a millionaire. Devoted fans inundated him with mail, and his obituary ran on the front pages of most American and British newspapers. He published stories in McClures, GoodHousekeeping, and the Saturday Evening Post. The mythical Alpine principality he created for Graustark, his first novel, inspired a rush of disappointed tourists. Broadway and Hollywood produced successful adaptations of his work. Wrote his brother Ben, "I think that if he wrotea treatise on hydraulic engineering it would sell over 300,000 copies." Moreover, he once shared a stage with fellow Indiana writers George Ade, Booth Tarkington, Lew Wallace and James Whitcomb Riley. Despite the greatpopularity accorded him during his lifetime, however, most of today's readers are wholly unfamiliar with the name and writings of George Barr McCutcheon (1866-1928). Indiana University Press is proud to reintroduce him to a new generation. McCutcheon represented the middle-America everyman who had "come up from a benighted Midwestern town," as one reviewer wrote, and made it in the big city. A native of Tippecanoe County, Indiana, McCutcheon studied at the Ford School and Purdue Preparatory Academy. He attended Purdue University, playing shortstop for the baseball team, until an overindulgence in unassigned writing caused him to fail his sophomore exams. He reported for the Lafeyette Journal (which allowed him the use of a typewriter for his literary endeavors), and later served as city editor for the Courier before moving to Chicago to seek his fortune. An extremely prolific author, McCutcheon not only produced over forty novels, but wrote several plays, short stories, and essaysas well. The theater, in fact, was his chief creative focus. His plays took a realist, progressive stance, satirizing Victorian mores, religious hypocrisy, and—in the age of Theodore Roosevelt—the gratuitous slaughter of wildanimals. They also dealt with far-sighted compassion toward topics like euthanasia and alcoholism. When the Frohman theater monopoly of the time refused to produce such controversial work, McCutcheon found an outlet forhis energies in fiction, even converting several of his plays into novel form. He invested his novels with a good deal of humor and with a warm humanity which charmed his audiences and made George Barr McCutcheon oneof the most popular writers of his time.
