Wallace Irwin

Over the course of his long career, Irwin wrote humorous sketches, light verse, screenplays, short stories, novels, nautical lays, aphorisms, journalism, political satire, lyrics for Broadway musicals, and the libretto for an opera.

[4] Irwin’s racial clichés brought him to the heights of success, including praise from Mark Twain who found Togo a delightful creation and the New York Globe which hailed the book as "the greatest joke in America".

Irwin’s approach likewise turned, resulting in Seed of the Sun with its dire warning that Japanese immigrants represented both the "nefarious alliance of Asiatics and speculative capital"[5] and their emperor’s plan for them to "marry Euro-American women in order to promote their race".

[6] Success as a humorist allowed Irwin to devote himself to what he considered his serious work, novels and articles with social and political purpose,[7] writing that is now largely forgotten except when cited by historians as representative of widespread pre-World War II racism.

That same year, 1959, his personal papers, including manuscripts to novels and poems, correspondence, freelance journalism, and an unpublished autobiography, were donated to the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.