Henry Milner Rideout

A native of Calais, Maine, he was the author of sixteen novels, twenty-three short stories and novellas and a biographical memoir.

She and Copeland motivated a group of Calais townspeople to lend Rideout the wherewithal to enter Harvard in 1895, where he was the first in his family to attend college.

To gather background material, he set off from San Francisco for six months of travel in the Far East under contract to the American Woolen Company, reporting on jute mills in the Philippines, Indonesia, and India.

When his final jute-reports were filed, he returned via Europe, and settled down in central California with his bank-manager brother to begin an all-out effort to write novels for a living.

As Rideout's work gained renown, readers in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain were eager for his stories.

His eminence became such that the San Francisco Chronicle ran a banner headline announcing his sudden death from pneumonia while on a family trip to Europe.

Some were farmers who made the most of the resources of the Maine coast by building a family schooner to venture to China or India on a trading voyage.

Though his most acclaimed work is in the former vein, yet toward the end of his life he did equally well with a group of traditional Chinese tales told him at the Sausalito kitchen table by his friend Pan Ruguei.

The classical training absorbed at Harvard shows in the commemorative ode commissioned from Rideout for the Tercentennial Anniversary of the settlement of Saint Croix Island, Maine in 1904.

It is appropriate that Maine lumberjack songs and sea chanteys recorded by Rideout are preserved on wax cylinders in the archive of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

On the other side it is equally far from the tar-and-tarpaulin kind of fiction...(Most of these were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, as were the greater number of the short stories and novellas listed below.)