Talk:Landy the Little

Information about this edition
Edition:	Extracted from Everybody's magazine (New York), Dec 1922, pp. 73-81.
Source:	https://archive.org/details/sim_everybodys-magazine_1922-12_47_6
Contributor(s):	ragpicker
Level of progress:
Notes:	Accompanying illustrations may be omitted
Proofreaders:	ragcleaner

Edison Marshall on himself

(From "Everybody's chimney Corner"—"Where Reader, Author and Editor Gather to Talk Things Over"—page 171.)

“I CAN think of many things that I haven’t done, only a few that I have done,” says Edison Marshall (“Landy the Little,” page 73), in reply to a request to write something about himself.

I have never seen Broadway or the White Lights, Coney Island or the Woolworth Building; and I have thought about them so long that they have begun to partake of a legendary character. Moreover, I don’t know that I dast go to New York. When I go to Seattle, which is sort of lively even if it hasn’t got four million, I nearly get run over by trucks and street-cars. I get in an occupied compartment when I try to go through a revolving door. I get hollered at by policemen and scorned and frightened half to death by haughty waiters. I lost my hat and put my foot through a bass drum at a cabaret. I tip more than I should because I’m scared not to, and once, on the way to a hunting-trip in Alaska, I got tired of looking for signs and stopped in the first place I came to to inquire where was the largest sporting-goods store in the city. Whereupon a young clerk looked me over and said, in great contempt, “Young man, you’re in it.”

But aside from meeting the publishers, there is one great reason why I should like very much to have the courage to go to New York. I want to visit the zoo.

There are many other things I haven’t done, and the things that I have done are not particularly important. I’ve been among wild life a good deal, traveled in some strange regions and got in some few, strange, fancy little messes. I love to write, and would keep on writing whether anybody paid me or not. I sold my first short story nine years ago, at the age of nineteen. By the time this gets into print, I shall have brought out five outdoor novels, one novel under a pen-name, and a volume of short stories. So you can see I have taken writing pretty seriously. I have a few things I am very proud of: my pioneer stock—humble men, but corking fighters, with Scriptural first names—and the work they and other pioneers did, that of building a great nation in a few generations; and when I go to England I shall brag like everything, much to Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s disgust. I am proud of the West, a grizzly skin, several other things and people, and I work like a slave at my books, so that I may be ultimately proud of them. Maybe I can sum up my advantages in this fashion: Shoot fair, fish fair, swim poor, golf don’t, tennis don’t, billiards can’t, and bridge won’t.