Henry Kitchell Webster’s Life-Loving, Pro-Business Fiction

A few years ago, I stumbled across a trove of fiction that helps sate my periodic craving for books both entertaining and relaxing: the works of Henry Kitchell Webster (1875–1932). Webster’s fiction has charming, intelligent characters who pursue their goals in unusual ways. The resolutions of his novels, short stories, and plays are unpredictable, except that they’re almost uniformly upbeat. I’ve read every novel and short story by Webster that I can get my hands on. I’ve even republished all of his short stories and a few of his novels. All had been out of print for about a century, with one exception.

The exception is the novel Calumet “K,” which Webster coauthored with his friend Samuel Merwin in 1901. Prominent philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand described Calumet “K” as her “favorite thing in all world literature” and in 1967, wrote an introduction for a new edition.¹ The appeal, she said, was that in the hero, Charlie Bannon, we see “the portrait of an efficacious man.”

The essence of the story is Bannon’s ingenuity in solving unexpected problems and smashing through sudden obstacles, his self-confident resourcefulness, his inexhaustible energy, his dedication. He is a man who takes nothing for granted, who thinks long-range, who assumes responsibility as a matter of course, as a way of life, knowing that there is no such thing as “luck” and if things are to be done, he has to do them.²

Such an outlook on life is a credit to the writer’s philosophy and psychology, but the time in which Webster lived helps explain why he chose writing as a career and why his works became so popular.

Context: America Circa 1900

By 1900, Americans had recovered from the devastation of the Civil War and had celebrated the centennial of their country. They had grown their economy so that it was second in the world only to Great Britain’s. They had raised their standard of living to a level higher than that of any other place or time in history. The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 honored the man who discovered America and celebrated progress in science, technology, manufacturing, and culture. In 1898, in a matter of months, the United States Army and Navy defeated Spanish forces in Cuba and the Philippines. Prosperous and secure, Americans had every reason to expect their lives to continue steadily improving.

With more leisure than ever before, they dived into the mass entertainment of the time: literature. Best-selling novels of the 1890s included Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz, Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, The Sign of Four (with Sherlock Holmes) by Arthur Conan Doyle, and The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Also popular were national magazines offering short stories and serialized novels: the Saturday Evening Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and many others.

But in this abundance of fiction, the men who created America’s wealth rarely figured as heroes. Mark Twain set the tone with his 1873 The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. His “businessmen” were either dreamers with the most nebulous of goals or scam artists and shysters.

Webster’s Early Career (1899–1906)

Enter Henry Kitchell Webster. Webster grew up near Chicago, then America’s second-largest city. In 1899, he published his first novel, written in collaboration with his friend Samuel Merwin.³ The Short Line War centers on a railroad that protagonist Jim Weeks is trying to gain control of.

Jim became famous and was libelled and flattered, respected and abused, by turns; but always he was feared. He was supposed to be dishonest, and it is true he did not scruple to use his enemies’ weapons; but at directors’ meetings it was the interest of the stockholders that he fought for.

Men wondered at his success, and over their cigars gravely discussed the reasons for it. Some said it was sheer good luck that turned what he touched to gold, some laid it to his start, and others to his cool, dispassionate strategy. To some extent it was all of these things; but more than anything else he had won as a bulldog does, by hanging on. Often he had beaten better strategists simply by keeping up the fight when by all the rules he was beaten.⁴

In 1901, the Saturday Evening Post published Webster’s “The Wedge,” in which a college student studying mechanical engineering helps break a strike at a foundry. The short story includes a vivid description of the foundry:

At last the pouring began. The foundry was nearly dark. The spout where the men were gathered projected out of a wall of blackened masonry that extended clear to the roof. At a word, someone with a rod sprang up and smote the wall just above where the spout could be guessed at in the dark, and out burst the river. White, incandescent, blinding, it brought out every line on the heavy, blackened faces that were gathered around it. It spattered drops of fire on everything, on the men themselves, but they merely shook them off and blinked at the blazing caldron, where the intolerable brightness, for it seemed no more substantial than that, was rising to the brim. Then after various pourings and checkings the men began filling their ladles and carrying them away into the murk, like planets with eccentric orbits, always going away from the sun, never coming back, their light throwing up distorted, diabolical silhouettes of the men who were struggling under them.⁵

This admiring attitude toward business, combined with vivid details of its operations, was new in fiction. Editors and readers found Webster’s characters appealing, his settings and stories unique and satisfying. He quickly made a niche for himself as the leading author of novels and short stories about businessmen and inventors. Calumet “K,” published in 1901, also coauthored with Merwin, was Webster’s first major success. Based on an event in the life of Webster’s father, it centers on the construction of a grain elevator in the Midwest.⁶

For the next few years, Webster sold a novel a year as a serial and/or book. But in 1905, Webster’s seventh novel was rejected by his publisher, and he had almost no savings to draw on.⁷ Suddenly, he had no means of supporting his family.

He tried his pen at muckraking—the favored genre of investigative journalists of the Progressive Era, who viewed industrialization, urbanization, and immigration as burgeoning problems that could be eliminated or alleviated only by massive legislative reforms.⁸ But Webster lacked the political tunnel vision necessary to portray whole industries as corrupt and immoral. The leader of an industry that Webster had been assigned to disparage promptly invited him to become the editor of the industry’s trade paper. “And if a would-be muckraker ever got a worse shock than that,” said Webster, “I have never heard of it.”⁹

Webster then decided to make a living by writing potboilers: run-of-the mill stories without originality in character or plot. So great was the demand for fiction in magazines that editors paid well for even second-rate stories. From 1906 to 1910 or so, Webster cranked out about five serialized potboilers per year, published under various pseudonyms.¹⁰ Income from these enabled him to spend time writing one higher-quality novel per year, which he published under his own name. He explained his reasoning in “Making a Living by Literature,” published anonymously in 1911 in the Saturday Evening Post:

“Commonplace, sordid, cynical!” I fancy I hear some of you saying. “That man runs a fiction factory. He calculates his costs like a shop superintendent. He deliberately cheapens himself; does less than the best he can, with no better excuse than that it earns him a living.”

Well, it seems to me that earning a living is a pretty good excuse. I have come to the conclusion that to earn an honest living is the first duty of man. If he can earn it by writing poetic dramas or composing symphonic poems, well and good. He is in luck. But if his five-act tragedies fail, if the world says they are not good enough to pay money for, I am not sure that he is entitled to ask the world to go on supporting him.

There is a certain group of cultured people who judge a piece of work by its pretensions rather than by its intrinsic merit. To their minds the dullest piece of musical writing in the form of a string quartet is more admirable than an irresistible bit of melody in some ragtime tune; the feeblest dramatic failure, huddling under a corner of the mantle of Maeterlinck or Ibsen, is more admirable, better worth doing, than the best modern short story. I don’t agree with those people, but I don’t expect to convert them. To my notion a comic-opera lyric, or a set of pictures in a Sunday supplement, or a romantic thriller such as I turn out every three months or so from my fiction factory may be good enough to be worth doing. I try my best to make them good enough.

Putting artistic considerations aside and taking my way of earning a living as a commercial proposition . . . I don’t know any other sort of work that could give me so large a measure of independence. . . . When I have done what will satisfy me as a day’s work I am my own man.¹¹

Within a relatively short time, Webster’s determination to make a living by writing and his continual practice of his craft led him to become a more nuanced writer.

Mid-Career (1906–1915)

In the novels and short stories published in his own name after his literary and economic crisis, Webster added more subtle characterization, more complex plots, and some romantic elements. The first such novel was Comrade John (1907, with Samuel Merwin), which pits John Chance—a brilliant young architect who creates structures of “lavish and almost unnecessary beauty” for amusement parks and expositions—against Herman Stein, an ambitious religious leader. Stein hires Chance to design and supervise construction of a resplendent temple. The only condition is that the building must appear to be the work of Stein’s disciples, created under Stein’s inspiration. Chance, who is something of a showman, assumes Stein is a kindred spirit and accepts the job. But Stein is also seeking a young, beautiful woman as a romantic partner whom he can mold into the face of his “Toil and Triumph” movement. He happens to choose Cynthia—the woman Chance fell in love with when he met her briefly in Paris. And the conflict is on.

In King in Khaki (1909), the man whose grueling work made a Caribbean island productive and profitable, confronts the New York wheeler-dealer who is plotting to deprive the island’s investors of their long-delayed rewards. Can the “king” defeat the wheeler-dealer and still win the love of the man’s beautiful daughter?

The Sky-Man (1910) involves the outcast inventor of a flying apparatus, a courageous young woman searching for her father (a lost explorer), and a murderous pirate. All are trapped in an uncharted Arctic wilderness for six long, dark months.¹²

One of the most strikingly modern and appealing figures in Webster’s fiction of this period is the title character of his play Mrs. Thornborough’s Apology.¹³ When the play begins in 1912, Mrs. Thornborough is forty-three. The stage directions describe her as having a look of “experience, confidence, authority, and repose; her eyes are deliberate and purposeful.” She has had a business career for more than two decades—extremely unusual for a woman at that time. For the past fifteen years, she has been the trusted second-in-command of a railroad magnate. A brief exchange early in the play establishes the complexity of the issues she deals with and the magnate’s trust in her judgment.

The magnate’s wife, utterly uninterested in railroads but jealous that her husband never consults her about them, discovers that Mrs. Thornborough is actually Miss Thornborough: As a young woman, she had a fling, knowing full well that she did not intend to marry and settle down. When she discovered that she was pregnant, she moved to another city and changed her title to “Mrs.”

Mrs. Thornborough doesn’t care what the jealous wife thinks, but she’s worried that her nineteen-year-old daughter (raised by conventionally minded women while her mother worked) will no longer love and respect her if she learns the truth. It’s possible, too, that the magnate will dismiss her from the job she loves, even though the affair happened long before they met. Complicating this fraught situation is the unexpected arrival of the man with whom she had the fling years ago, whom she hasn’t seen since.

When this play was performed in 1912, the Victorian era had ended, and the women’s suffrage movement was slowly gathering momentum. Still, Webster’s decision to portray an unwed mother as a successful businesswoman—never mind a heroine—was controversial.¹⁴

Beginning in 1906, the settings of some of Webster’s stories shifted from heavy industry to the business of the arts. “The Lost Princess” (1906) focuses on an actress and an artist. In his mystery novel The Butterfly (1914), the main characters are a drama professor who’d prefer to write for Broadway and a highly intelligent dancer whose routines scandalize many.

Drama Clubs used to come to New York en masse to see for themselves whether her dances were, as many authorities declared, not only the most beautiful, but the purest and most edifying exhibitions which had ever been offered for the enlightenment of the American people, or whether Elaine deserved to be turned over to the mercy of the shocked and outraged sensibilities of the police.¹⁵

The lead characters in “The Ingredients” (1912) are a businessman’s daughter who married, then divorced, a European nobleman and an artist who’s fallen into a rut painting society portraits. They must decide which “ingredients” of their own characters they value. “The Painted Scene” (1914) involves a chorus girl who’s mocked by her colleagues for her “capacity for wonder.” As the story opens, she has fallen in love with the Panama Canal as she sees it on a set for a lavish Broadway musical and has set out enthusiastically to learn how the canal works.

From 1901 to 1916, thirty-four of Webster’s short stories appeared in national magazines. Then he shifted gears again.

Later Novels (1916–1932)

Starting in 1916, Webster wrote far fewer short stories, focusing instead on novels. Although his early and mid-career novels are very enjoyable, the ones he wrote in this later period are even richer in characterization and have even more complex plots. Heading the list is The Real Adventure (1916). Rose, a beautiful, intelligent woman, falls in love with Rodney, a smart, handsome, productive businessman. She marries him—that’s the original “adventure”—then realizes that she wants to be Rodney’s intellectual partner, not just the woman he makes love to and indulges. How Rose pursues her ideal marriage is the “real” adventure.

As with Mrs. Thornborough’s Apology, Webster portrayed as a heroine a woman who wanted to be more than a stay-at-home wife and mother. And as with the earlier play, contemporaries found Rose’s values and actions controversial. Webster exchanged several letters with fellow novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879–1958) about the effects of Rose’s quest on her children. Their correspondence is a reminder of the serious issues that Webster often raised as part of his novels—in this case, a glimpse into the state of child rearing as the women’s suffrage movement gained traction. Fisher, one of the first Americans to write on the Montessori method, had strong feelings about childhood education:

You . . . make me laugh with your casual waving away to a hypothetical perfect nurse with no nerves and perfect judgment about children, the fearful, tragic, distracting, and utterly fascinating problem for modern mothers of what to do with their own children. . . . [N]obody else can bring up your children adequately but somebody quite as intelligent, well-educated, and sensitive as you are!¹⁶

Webster responded that perhaps four-fifths of the work of infant care was routine and menial, and that mothers who find too little intellectual stimulation in such work are “bad nurses for their children on that account—too tense and too emotional about them, exciting them in turn, wearing and heating like badly oiled bearings.”¹⁷

Webster’s other serious novels of this period include The Thoroughbred, An American Family, Mary Wollaston, Joseph Greer and His Daughter, The Innocents, and The Beginners. As a respite from such novels, Webster still occasionally wrote mysteries, including Real Life (Into Which Miss Leda Swan of Hollywood Makes an Adventurous Excursion), The Corbin Necklace, Philopena, The Clock Strikes Two, The Quartz Eye, The Sealed Trunk, and The Man with the Scarred Hand. They are pleasant reading, even if their moral dilemmas are not as interesting as those in The Real Adventure and Webster’s other serious novels.

The Gales of Change

In the first decades of the 20th century, Webster was a well-known, well-paid, and highly respected author. By the time he died in 1932, he had published under his own name forty-four short stories in national magazines and twenty-nine novels.¹⁸ One of his plays had been performed on Broadway, and he was credited with writing eleven movies.¹⁹

Webster’s fiction displays the positive sense of life common among Americans of the early 20th century. We see it in the works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Singer Sargent, and Frank Lloyd Wright, among many others. Each, in his own unique way, conveyed the message: You can create your own character; you can choose the type of happiness to pursue. Difficulties may, of course, arise from nature or from disagreements with others. But, with appropriate physical and mental effort, you can overcome them, and your ability to do so will be rewarded. In short: Life can be fascinating, challenging, and beautiful. Ayn Rand’s description of the sense of life illustrated in Calumet “K” captures the tenor of Webster’s fiction more broadly:

It was written for a wide popular audience, and reflects the dominant sense of life of its time. It was a time when people were capable of admiring productive achievement, when they saw man as strong, confident, cheerfully efficacious—and the universe as a place where victory and fulfillment are possible.²⁰

But by the 1910s, when Webster was in mid-career, avant-garde writers veered violently away from charming characters, suspenseful plots, and upbeat endings. Critically acclaimed works of that decade include Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence, Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, Dubliners by James Joyce, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. In a 1921 essay in the New York Times, Webster tried to explain why such novels succeeded.

Is there any real reason, then, why a serious novel should not be a good story; why it should be dull, pompous, didactic; why it should move as slowly as a glacier and drag along its flanks as much extraneous matter as a glacial moraine? Dismembered and chaotic masses of Marxian socialism, of Freudian psychology—disquisitions even upon the flora and fauna of the sea? . . . In brief, it involves our Puritan origins. . . . If you liked it it was bad for you. Unless you were miserable and atrabilious, melancholy enough to turn milk, it was perfectly certain that you weren’t good.²¹

By the 1920s, the sense of life of the American public began to change as well, due in part to the rise of the Progressive movement and the horrors of World War I. Businessmen were attacked rather than admired. Industrial and technological progress were no longer viewed as inevitable or overwhelmingly good. Webster’s works still sold, but most fell out of print after the first edition, and his earlier works were not reprinted.

A hundred years later, it’s refreshing to experience the sunlit sense of life of an era when progress was considered normal and desirable. Some fiction of that era has very antiquated attitudes toward relationships between the sexes and races. Such attitudes don’t generally appear in Webster’s fiction, although once in a great while a character uses slang that would be unacceptable today. It’s easy to excuse Webster’s rare use of such terms in return for the delight his stories offer.

Availability

If you’re curious about Webster’s fiction but don’t want to begin by investing time in a novel, the short stories in the four-volume Collected Short Works of Henry Kitchell Webster and Related Correspondence (2019–2021) are a great place to start. The set includes all forty-four of the short stories Webster published under his own name, as well as a number of unpublished stories and dramas, plus hundreds of Webster’s letters. The letters (transcribed from the archive of Webster’s papers in the Newberry Library in Chicago) frequently deal with the art and business of writing, for which much of Webster’s advice is still relevant. They also deal with matters ranging from Herbert Hoover’s presidential candidacy (1920) and the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (John Philip Sousa, 1918) to why American tourists are disliked abroad (1928).

Some of Webster’s novels (those from 1925 and earlier) are now in the public domain and can be downloaded via Google Books or Project Gutenberg. I’ve republished four of the early novels, in print and Kindle format: Comrade John, A King in Khaki, The Sky-Man, and The Butterfly.²² The novels from 1926 and later are available only in secondhand copies.

But, in my experience, all of Webster’s works are worth the time and effort. They show that there’s no good reason “why a serious novel should not be a good story.”

About Dianne Durante

Dianne Durante (PhD, University of Cincinnati) is an independent researcher, freelance writer, and lecturer. She has written extensively on art and art history (including Innovators in Sculpture and Innovators in Painting) and on Alexander Hamilton (including The Financial Programs of Alexander Hamilton), and has republished many works by Henry Kitchell Webster. She offers weekly art-related recommendations. Learn more about her work at www.DianneDuranteWriter.com.

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