The Country Gentleman
The Country Gentleman addresses a class of readers whose interests are keyed to country life and the industry of agriculture. This field is big enough to include more than half of the nation’s population. Our editorial problem is not one of tying in narrowly to scientific discussions of only the growing phases of farming but ranges throughout the innumerable business and social problems of the American country-side. It is our aim to discuss everything that should help to broaden the farmer’s vision of his own problems and also of all interrelated problems that help to make him a vital factor as a citizen of the United States.
In presenting fiction, we aim, so far as possible, to confine the themes to country life and the open spaces of the world outdoors. We eschew jazzily up-to-date urbanized fiction, sex novels, the eternal triangle and the purely psychologic story. Naturally we will always give a preference to fiction related to farming by first-class writers who are thoroughly familiar with farming.
It is our feeling that the American farmer is interested in everything that has any contact with country life. Hunting and fishing and outdoor adventure are his life-long sports. He has a deep and genuine affection for animals that serve him. He manifests a very live interest in stories that deal with his marketing problems, and his ever-pressing problem of financing his business. He has an alert interest in his schools, his newspapers, in local, state and national government. He enjoys character studies and has a vastly sharper sense of humor than he is commonly credited with. Likewise he is a shrewd critic and quickly resents the sort of attempted slurs that are so frequently made upon rural folk by those who are wholly ignorant of farming.
We feel justified in being guided by several successful experiments we have made with our fiction. We persuaded Mr. Freeman Tilden, who is a farmer himself and thoroughly familiar with all phases of agriculture, to create a character in Old Man Crabtree who might be defined as “a Wallingford baiter.” Mr. Crabtree is a shrewd retired country banker. His experience had taught him all the tricks of “high finance” and he was always on the lookout for the specialists in shoddy and sham when they came to town. In the climax the skinners were invariably neatly flayed by Old Man Crabtree. These stories of Mr. Tilden were real and drew in a continuous flow of favorable comment.
Zane Grey has always been able to strike a responsive chord with the lovers of outdoor life, of whom the American farmer is undoubtedly in the majority. They like his descriptions of the frontier as it was in the 70’s and they seem to be keen for his vigorous characters, notwithstanding how strenuous.
We like good dog stories of the sort Albert Payson Terhune has been writing for us. And we like small town stories when they are as good as those Tom P. Morgan is writing; but then, Tom Morgan lived these stories for fifty years before he began to write them.
The great majority of our contributors have specialized in some agricultural pursuit. Many of them are living on their farms and conducting them as successful business enterprises. We number among our most valued contributors the heads of leading agricultural colleges, federal and state government experts, graduates of agricultural colleges who are now devoting all their time to writing, county agricultural agents, engineers who are specializing in agricultural mechanics and so on. Among them are such well-known men as Eugene Davenport, Dean of the Illinois College of Agriculture, Herbert Quick, until recently a member of the Federal Farm Loan Board, Frank A. Waugh, Professor of Horticulture, Massachusetts College of Agriculture, E. V. Wilcox and J. Sidney Cates, for many years employed as farm management experts by the United States Department of Agriculture, and P. S. Lovejoy, Professor of Forestry, University of Michigan.
Such writers as I have described above supply the bulk of the contents of The Country Gentleman and consequently to preserve a balanced ration, as a livestock feeder would say, we try our utmost to obtain the sort of fiction that will round out the ensemble.
Barton W. Currie.
The Country Gentleman.
Curtis Publishing Co.,
Independence Square,
Philadelphia, Pa.