Page 41 - To Dragma October 1930

JANUARY. 1930 39

^With an <^y4uthor9s ^4gent

—and tells you about

Jean Wick

who is

MRS. A C H M E D A B D U L L A H

in Private J^ife

ortable, and chatting all the while. Tiny and very tremendously alive,
with soft waves of brown bobbed hair circling her head, she seated her-
elf opposite me. And, all due to Jean Wick's faculty of coziness,
hortly I was feeling as much at home as if I had had many a previous
isit.

We began to talk about herself and her work.
She explained that directly after she had graduated from Barnard,
he became the Executive Secretary to the president of Silver Burdett
nd Company, publishers of text books. Presently she was no longer
onnected with that house, but was doing promotion work with Mr.
Robert Foresman on the merger of Everybody's Magazine and the De-
ineator.

As she herself expresses it, Miss Wick "served her editorial ap-
prenticeship." But editorial work was too confining, Miss Wick found.
t offered little scope for creative writing and so, with such a thought
n mind, she began very shortly to free lance. To such periodicals as
Collier's, Miss Wick contributed short stories and to other publications,
nterviews and kindred articles. A t intervals, moreover, during the
while that she was producing literature, she taught English in the New
York City high schools.

There came a year when she went abroad. Living in England for
he most part, though visiting in summer months such continental coun-
ries as France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany, Jean Wick busied
herself with the art of writing. George Bernard Shaw, Hugh Walpole,
nd the like of such British literary lights, were among those with whom
he obtained interviews—reports Miss Wick in a modestly offhand man-
ner.

Came the war. And back to those shores traveled the little lady—
not one whit the less vigorous for her European sojourn.

The plunge into literary agency work was almost immediate and,
o cover some fifteen years in a short yet emphatic sentence, her ac-
ivity along those lines has been anything but passive. Among the