Ben Ames Williams - Career

Career

Williams was first published on August 23, 1915 in The Popular Magazine with his short story “Deep Stuff.” After that his popularity slowly grew. On April 14, 1917, the Saturday Evening Post picked up one of William’s stories, “The Mate of the Susie Oakes.” Richard Cary highlights the privilege of being printed in the pages of this mammoth magazine: “The Saturday Evening Post represented an Olympus of a sort to him and his contemporaries. To be gathered into its pantheon of authors, to be accepted three or five or eight (and eventually twenty-one) times in a year constituted a seal of approval and a personal vindication”. ,” and it certainly helped his career. He published 135 short stories, 35 serials, and 7 articles for the Post during a period of 24 years. After the Post took him, other magazines began eagerly seeking Williams to submit his fiction to their magazines.

Although there generally is not a common theme running through Williams’ work, the pieces he contributed to the Saturday Evening Post tended to be focused on the business environment. Such stories of his as “His Public” compliment the business slant of the Post. Williams became “identified in later years with rural Maine because so many of his stories were set there”. ”. He owned a summer home there, and grew fond of the land because he spent so much of his free time in Maine with friend A.L. McCorrison. Williams is perhaps most famous for creating the fictional town of Fraternity, located in rural Maine. 125 of his short stories were set in Fraternity, and they were most popular in the Post, though George Horace Lorimer was always upset that there was too much character and not enough plot in these stories ”.. Maine is also the setting for many of his novels.