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A Note By the Author

A temperamental consciouness of material force brought Hugo Danner into being. The frustration of my own muscles by things, and the alarming superiority of machinery started the notion of a man who would be invincible. I gave him a name and planned random deeds for him. I let him tear down Brooklyn Bridge and lift a locomotive. Then I began to speculate about his future and it seemed to me that a human being thus equipped would be foredoomed to vulgar fame or to a life of fruitless destruction. He would share the isolation of geniuses and with them would learn the inflexibility of man's slow evolution. To that extent Hugo became symbolic and Gladiator a satire. The rest was adventure and perhaps more of the book derives from the unliterary excitement of imagining such a life than from a studious juxtaposition of incidents to a theme.

Previous to the appearance of Gladiator, although not before its conception, I wrote Heavy Laden and Babes and Sucklings. Both ware realistic stories of people and places which I had known. The brief I held for realism convinces me less and less. Space is wide. Man is small. That he exists is romantic. The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose.

Myself and my life must be of scant importance to any one but me. My father is a Presbyterian minister. My mother, who died when I was five, had published one novel which was well received. With my brothers and sisters, I was taught to read at a very early age. It was always a vehemently enforced custom in my family never to overlook a word we did not know, never to mispronounce, never to err in grammar. The first writing I ever marketed was a verse I wrote when I was twelve.

For the rest -- common school, high school, three years at Princeton where I was a wretched student, some time on the Atlantic and the Pacific as an ordinary seaman, a summer of hunting and exploring in northern Canada, several trips through most of the States, two protracted visits to France, a year as a publicity man, two on the editorial staff of the New Yorker, one as an advertising manager. I am twenty-seven. I am married. I like to be out of doors in any place that is warm and sunny. I have written twenty thousand words in a day which were subsequently published as they stood. Oridinarily. I write about three thousand words on three or four days a week. By strangers I am usually mistaken for my son, or, at, best, an undergraduate of the nearest university.

I have been loath to set down this untidy catalogue of myself and now willingly commend the reader to the more spectacular life of Hugo Danner.