Background

Samuel Hopkins Adams was born on January 26, 1871 in Dunkirk, New York, United States, the son of Myron Adams, a Presbyterian minister, and Hester Rose Hopkins. His grandparents were distantly related to, but apparently not overawed by, the better-known Boston Adamses.

Education

Adams attended the Free Academy in Rochester, New York, and spent one semester at Union College, but received the Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1891 from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

Career

Upon graduation Adams joined the New York Sun as a reporter and special writer, one of a generation of "gentlemen journalists", who were trained on that paper in the exacting traditions of its editor Charles A. Dana.

In 1900 Adams was hired by S. S. McClure for McClure's Magazine. He was a staff member from 1903 to 1905, when the muckraking movement was at its height. Adams quickly made his own mark as a muckraking journalist with a series of articles for Collier's Weekly on patent medicine and medical quackery; together with such men as Harvey Wiley and Upton Sinclair he was credited with having inspired the passage by Congress of the Pure Food and Drug Act. The American Medical Association sponsored the publication of the Collier's articles as Adams' first book, The Great American Fraud (1906).

Thereafter, except for a brief stint as editor of Ridgeway's Weekly (1910), Adams was a free-lance writer, producing some fifty books and numerous articles and short stories in the course of his career.

Few of Adams' works won lasting critical acclaim but almost all were commercially successful. He wrote mystery stories, historical romances, and novels about crusading newspapermen (The Clarion, 1914). Under the pseudonym Warner Fabian he wrote the novel Flaming Youth (1923), whose title was quickly adopted as one of the labels for the 1920's. In 1926 he wrote Revelry, a melodramatic fictionalized account of Warren Harding's presidency; the book was condemned by several state legislatures, and banned in Philadelphia and Washington, D. C. --in the meantime selling 100, 000 copies.

Seventeen of Adams' novels and stories became motion pictures; in addition to Flaming Youth, these included The Gorgeous Hussy, starring Joan Crawford, for which he wrote the screenplay (1936); It Happened One Night, with Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable (based on his short story "Night Bus, " 1934); and The Harvey Girls (1942).

Adams ventured into nonfiction with The Godlike Daniel (1930), a colorful but unreliable biography of Daniel Webster, and Incredible Era (1939), an account of the Harding administration. In the absence of Harding's presidential papers--then inaccessible--such a book necessarily had to be largely a matter of hearsay and conjecture, as the author acknowledged in his introduction.

In his later years Adams turned again to biography (Alexander Woollcott: His Life and His World, 1945), to juvenile historical fiction (The Pony Express, The Santa Fé) Trail, The Erie Canal), and to family reminiscence, in a delightful series of New Yorker essays published as Grandfather Stories (1955).

Tenderloin, a novel of turn-of-the-century Manhattan drawn from his observations in the 1890's as a reporter for the Sun, was in press when he died. It was promptly turned into a Broadway musical.

Adams died on November 15, 1958 in Beaufort, South Carolina.

Achievements

• Adams wrote more than 50 books of fiction, biography, and exposé. His Incredible Era was accepted for many years as "indisputably the best book on Warren Harding and his administration. " He was also known for a series of articles for "Collier's Weekly" that exposed worthless patent medicines and their fraudulent advertising in newspapers and magazines. For his exposé work he was made a lay associate member of the American Medical Association in 1913. Several of his novels became movie scenarios, notably It Happened One Night (1934) and a musical, The Harvey Girls (1942).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Our Square And The People In It

    (A wonderful collection of short stories, featuring the fo...)

  • Canal Town

    (A classic historical novel of a young doctor and the Erie...)

  • Average Jones

    (Average Jones is a young, independently wealthy, brillian...)

  • The Harvey Girls

    (A novel of three unusual girls who worked for the Fred Ha...)

  • The Unspeakable Perk

    (Samuel Hopkins Adams was an American writer, best known f...)

  • Grand-Father Stories

    (Written by Samuel Hopkins Adams, published by Random Hous...)

  • The Pony Express (Landmark Books #7)

    (For New condition books in our store; You will be the fir...)

  • Tenderloin

    (A gay nineties novel about sin and society in New York)

  • The Clarion (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Clarion Just a moment, my friend. The P...)

  • book

Views

Quotations: "Freedom of thought, action and mode of existence, and this in an era when individual choice, threatened as it is throughout an imperiled world, has never been so precious. "

"I'm damned if I want my last novel to appear posthumously. "

"With a few honorable exceptions the press of the United States is at the beck and call of the patent medicines. Not only do the newspapers modify news possibly affecting these interests, but they sometimes become their agents. "

"We are living at a time when creeds and ideologies vary and clash. But the gospel of human sympathy is universal and eternal. "

"The ordinary run of advertising is nothing more than an effort to sell something by yelling in print. "

Membership

Associate member of the American Medical Association

Connections

On October 19, 1898, Adams married Elizabeth Remson Noyes; they had two children. That marriage ended in divorce in 1909, and on April 11, 1915, Adams married former stage actress Jane Peyton Van Norman Post.

Father:

Myron Adams

clergyman

Mother:

Hester Rose Hopkins

Spouse:

Jane Peyton (Van Norman) Adams

Spouse:

Elizabeth Remson (Noyes) Adams

References

• Samuel Hopkins Adams and the Business of Writing