(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.
Hughes was born on January 31, 1872, in Lancaster, Missouri. He was the son of Felix Turner Hughes, a lawyer and railroad president, and of Jean Amelia Summerlin, who, Hughes recollected, "brought us all up with artistic ideals and passions. " He added, "My mother instilled the ambitions, and my father found the funds. " His older brother, Howard Robard, inventor of the Hughes conical bit that revolutionized rotary drilling, was the father of Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire. Rupert Hughes's novel The Old Nest (1912), based on his family, was adapted as a motion picture in 1921 and grossed nearly a million dollars.
Education
Hughes received his secondary education at Western Reserve Academy, then the B. A. from Adelbert College (now Case-Western Reserve University) in 1892 and the M. A. in 1894.
Intending to become a professor of English literature, Hughes earned the M. A. at Yale in 1899.
Career
His interests in writing, music, and the theater drew him to New York City, where he established himself in the publishing world. While working as assistant editor of Godey's, Current Literature, and Criterion, he contributed short stories, articles, verse, and criticism to Scribner's, Century, Cosmopolitan, and other periodicals. Serials published in St. Nicholas appeared as his first book, The Lakerim Athletic Club (1898). In May 1901 Hughes began editoral work in London with The Historian's History of the World, a multivolume project that took him to the British Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and numerous American scholarly libraries. He dated his own research on George Washington from this period. Upon his return to New York in November 1902, Hughes embarked upon a career as editor and author.
Until 1905 he worked for the Encyclopaedia Britannica Company, meanwhile publishing on his own. He had brought out a book of verse, Gyges Ring, in 1901; a number of his poems are listed in Granger's Index to Poetry. His Music Lovers' Encyclopedia (1903), which went through many editions, was revised in 1950 by Deems Taylor and Russell Kerr and was reprinted in 1971. While he was in London, Hughes saw his play The Wooden Wedding produced in 1902; in the next twenty years he wrote more than a dozen plays. Alexander the Great toured the United States in 1903-1904; and The Transformation (revived as Two Women) and The Bridge (revived as The Man Between) toured in 1910-1912. His most successful stage effort was the farce Excuse Me, a comedy set in two railroad cars traveling from Chicago to San Francisco, which was produced in New York in 1911, in Australia in 1913, and in London in 1915; two companies toured the United States in 1912-1914.
Hughes maintained a lifelong interest in the National Guard, rising from private to captain in the Seventh Regiment, New York National Guard, between 1897 and 1908. The preparedness movement of 1915 engaged his attention as publicist and citizen soldier. His articles in Collier's in 1916 stated the case for the National Guard and told of his own brief participation as a captain in the Sixty-ninth Regular Infantry of the New York National Guard in the Mexican border campaign led by General John J. Pershing. His increasing deafness prevented overseas service, and during the war he was a censor in military intelligence in Washington, rising to the rank of major.
While he was bringing out plays, Hughes also was producing fiction. His stories found purchasers in the new motion picture industry. Mary Pickford played in Johanna Enlists, based on a story he wrote in 1916; and Douglas Fairbanks made his stage debut in All for a Girl, a play that Hughes wrote. Hughes began turning many of his short stories and novels into film scripts. In 1919, when Samuel Goldwyn and Rex Beach organized Eminent Authors Pictures to exploit the talents of well-known American novelists and film writers, Hughes, with Gertrude Atherton and Mary Roberts Rinehart, was publicized throughout the country. He alone of the group produced a successful script, The Old Nest. Money in large amounts was coming his way; Walter Wanger paid him $75, 000 for movie righs to a novel. Before long Hughes was traveling from his farm near Bedford Hills, N. Y. , to Hollywood to supervise scenario changes. Short visits became longer ones; by 1923 he was living in Hollywood, where he built a mansion inspired by illustrations in The Arabian Nights. Throughout the 1920's and 1930's he wrote and directed films. The Patent Leather Kid, based on one of his short stories, won an Oscar nomination in 1927.
After his second wife's death, Hughes entered an iconoclastic phase. Previously a writer of farce and light fiction, he now shocked religious conservatives with an indictment of religion, and superpatriots with his candid biography of George Washington. Hughes's enduring reputation rests upon his three-volume life of George Washington (1926 - 1930). Readers were unprepared for the realistic figure presented in fresh detail. "One does not get a sense of balance [in Washington biographies] until the work of Rupert Hughes, " Morton Borden asserted of this landmark in Washington historiography. Hughes exploited John C. Fitzpatrick's unexpurgated edition of Washington's diaries (1925), the papers of Sir Henry Clinton, and other original sources. The depth of research surprised scholars accustomed to regard Hughes as a facile writer for popular magazines; the candor of his portrait of Washington provoked the ire of professional patriots. With the appearance of the third volume, the historian Henry Steele Commager observed, "This work, which at first aroused mainly the supercilious wonder of some professional historians, has now justly earned the encomiums of all students of history . .. ." The Anglophobe mayor of Chicago, "Big Bill" Thompson, branded Hughes "a cheap skate looking for publicity, " prompting Hughes to write "Plea for Frankness in Writing History. " Hughes showed that Washington was capable of profanity. His insistence that Washington was in love with Sally Fairfax, the wife of a friend, occasioned a spirited exchange in American Historical Review (1934) between Hughes and another Washington authority, N. W. Stephenson, who repudiated "the Sally Fairfax myth. " Later biographers, including Douglas S. Freeman and James T. Flexner, have sustained Hughes in this dispute. Freeman, furthermore, in his account of the battle of Brandywine made full and grateful use of Hughes's research. His success in humanizing Washington, his thoroughness in research, and his fairness to Washington's opponents (including General Thomas Conway, who reputedly plotted to oust Washington as commander in chief) earned Hughes the respect of many academic historians and laymen. For his part, looking back over the buffeting he had received for his biography of the great folk hero, Hughes acknowledged, in Pacific Historical Review (1933), "Countless pitfalls pockmark the field of biography. .. I think I have fallen into most of them. "
While he was working on his life of Washington, Hughes continued to write light fiction and motion picture scripts. In 1940 he brought out Attorney for the People, an admiring biography of the future Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey. At the outbreak of World War II, Hughes helped to form the California State Guard (1940), and as a colonel he commanded the Second Regiment from 1941 to 1943. During the last years of the war he had a weekly radio program on the National Broadcasting Company network. He was among the outspoken critics of Communism and Communist sympathizers in Hollywood in the 1930's and 1940's. He died in Los Angeles.
Achievements
Rupert Hughes has been listed as a notable author by Marquis Who's Who.
In an agnostic article in Cosmopolitan (1924), he explained why he had stopped going to church: "What is preached in the churches is mainly untrue, or unimportant, or tiresome, or hostile to genuine progress and in general not worth while. "
Views
Quotations:
"Women's intuition is the result of millions of years of not thinking. "
Connections
Hughes's three marriages all ended tragically. On December 12, 1893, he married Agnes Wheeler Hedge; they had no children. In November 1903 he was divorced from his first wife after a dramatic trial in which he named ten corespondents. In 1908 he married Alelaide Manola Mould, a widow with two children. She had had a stage career that included the leading role in Hughes's play All for a Girl. She collaborated with Hughes on two motion picture scenarios and other works, and wrote poetry. In ill health in 1923, she committed suicide while on a round-the-world cruise taken to help her convalesce. Hughes edited a collection of her poems, The Poems of Adelaide Manola (1924).
On December 31, 1924, Hughes married the writer Elizabeth Patterson Dial, who was thirty-one years his junior. An intense woman with loftier literary goals for herself than she could attain, she committed suicide in 1945.
