Allan Eugene Updegraff

After he and his friend, Sinclair Lewis, dropped out of Yale during his junior year, he made a living working odd jobs, as well as writing stories for magazines and newspapers.

During his freshman year he won the annual award for "excellence in English" for his paper on James Fenimore Cooper, for which he received a $30 prize.

[5] After a month, during which Lewis and Updegraff spent most of their time "carrying around beds and mattresses and tending a furnace that insisted upon going out," the two left and moved into a tenement on the lower east side in New York City, on Avenue B between Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets.

[8][5] Updegraff did not remain in his new apartment very long, and in the summer of 1907 he and a friend, Joseph Barrat, began a journey on foot from New York to Fiji, by way of San Francisco,[9] although some accounts had him going out west to seek fresher air to help him get over a bout of malaria.

[10] During this early part of his life Updegraff supported himself with a number of clerical positions, including at the Charity Organization Society and Publishers' Newspaper Syndicate.

[16] Some of his essays/short stories published in national newspapers included: "A German Alliance",[17] "Two Mornings",[18] "The Wash-Publish Machine",[19] "Mr. Boggs Pulls Wires",[20] and "That Remarkable Infant".

The Times called the story "a gem", and stated that Upegraff had a "... sure touch of inspiration, backed by what seems the largest fund of information and experience ever accorded a writing man.

Entitled Prairie Gold, the book was a collection of stories, poems and sketches, with all profits going to help the Red Cross' war effort.

"[41] In 1918, in celebration of the end of the First World War, Updegraff published a poem in The New York Times, entitled, "The Bells–The Bells of Victory!

[3] After his move to Paris, Updegraff published his fourth novel, Whatever We Do, in 1927; a chronicle of a week in the life of some American tourists along the French Riveria.

[46] The Oakland Tribune gave the book a good review, calling it an "... amusing, shocking and biting novel ...." They felt it was a "... book of contradictions, one of surprise and beauty as well as one of many drinks and loose adventures," and they complimented Updegraff's writing style, stating that his methods "... through force of rare skill, lifts the reader from his chair.

"[47] By the end of November 1928, Updegraff was visiting the United States, and it was reported that he had already begun work on his fifth novel, which was scheduled for publication in 1929.

[48] However, the book, titled Native Soil, was not published until the beginning of 1930, and dealt with the return of a young man from living abroad in Europe to his home town of Springfield, Illinois.