Page 37 - 1930 October - To Dragma

3o To DRAGMA

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Miss Chase, author of Pictorial Review's prise-
winning story, "Salesmanship," in this issue, is pro-
fessor of English language and literature at Smith
College, Northampton, Mass. She was born at Blue
Hill, Me., a seacoast village east of Penobscot Bay.

Educated in the country schools and in the Acad-
emy of Blue Hill, she was trained in the Greek and
Latin classics, and in 1909 was graduated from the
University of Maine. She then started to teach.

Her first short stories were published in 1918
and 1919. Recently she has turned her efforts to the
essay, and five of these have appeared in magazines
within the last four years. She has five books to
her credit, and the sixth, "The Silver Shell," zvas
published this Summer.

• *• "

Jfow & "Won the 'Pictorial

%eview $2,500 'Prize

By M A R Y E L L E N C H A S E

Written for "Writer's Digest" .

THIS article about a prize story is written in deplorable haste while
Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne (who really could and did
write in an age when prizes were unknown!) reluctantly are set
aside, and preparation for a college class in Eighteen Century Fiction
is pushed for an hour into the background.

At the outset I may say that the thought of writing a prize story
never once entered my imagination, sanguine as it is about lesser
matters. I t was, in fact, almost by chance that I wrote the story
at all, for of late years my literary efforts, always of necessity curtailed
by the rightful demands of an academic life, have been directed to
essays and reviews. I had, indeed, proclaimed, to myself at least, that
my mind was not a story one, and this assertion had been ably seconded,
I regret to say, by various editors. I had written and sold stories,
it is true, during the last ten years, but they were in almost every case
stories motivated by character or by thesis rather than by situation.

I received Pictorial Review's announcement of its contest sometime