Page:Amazing Stories Volume 16 Number 12.djvu/239

I was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on April 15, 1908. Before my first birthday, the family moved to Arapahoe, Nebraska (population 1000) in the southwestern part of the state.

During the first twelve years of my life I went through the same experiences of almost any other boy who lived in a small midwestem town. There were school-day escapades and marbles and swimming. A series of hills, known locally as the "bluffs" served as an excellent location for hikes and arrow-head hunts and cowboy and Indian games.

Reading held my greatest interest, however. I discovered the Tarzan books during this period, believed in them implicitly, and practised tree-swinging in the heavy growth along the Republican river banks. Other favorite books, read many times, were the Henty series, Rover Boys, Horatio Alger, Sir Rider Haggard, Richard Harding Davis, Mark Twain, etc., etc. When the town's small Public Library was exhausted, I raided the bookshelves of the townspeople. Whenever a family moved into Arapahoe in those days, the housewife wouldn't have her pictures hung before I was knocking at the door to ask if she had any books!

In 1919 my father died, and mother and I moved to Lincoln, Nebraska. There, I attended high school, graduated after a decent interval and entered the University of Nebraska, where I made a fruitless attempt to become a member of the Cornbusker football team.

My first effort at this business of writing appeared as a serial story in the high school weekly.

Later, several of my short stories appeared in Awgawan, the University magazine.

I did not return to the University after my second year, accepting, instead, an offer to cover high school sports for an Omaha newspaper. I stuck at that for a year, held a few other short-lived jobs that amounted to little, and, in 1926, hitch-hiked east to Chicago.

That was sixteen years ago, and I'm still in Chicago. During the first three years I worked as (1) an order picker in a steel foundry, (2) waiter in a tuberculosis sanitarium, (3) shipping clerk in a State Street department store, (4) butter and egg salesman, (5) night clerk in a small hotel, (6) collection correspondent in an outlying department store, (7) machine operator for a furniture manufacturer, and (8) collection correspondent for another State Street department store. The last kept me at the same desk for seven years; during the 1930-'36 period you held onto your job and hoped it would last!

In 1936 I accepted a position as Credit Manager for one of the largest retail furniture chains in the country—and abandoned it for editing.

Howard Brown

While all the above was transpiring, I acquired a wife, a son and a daughter. If I never do anything else, I'll at least have that much to the credit side of my personal ledger!

Sometime during the latter part of 1937 I went back, in a part time way, to writing. I used up almost every Sunday in two years doing a novel about a Cro-Magnon man of twenty thousand years ago. It made up in length for what it lacked in merit—five hundred pages that bounced around publishers' offices all over the East. Four editors offered to print it if I'd cut the wordage in half. I said something like, "What! All them beautiful words? Nothing doing!" to the first three. But the fourth editor verbally beat some sense into my skull; and with much suffering, I cut and cut—and cut! The windup: the book will be out next Spring, but Amazing gives it to you now!

In the meantime, I did a second novel, called Halo in Ink, on which the war has halted publication.

My first shot at this market was taken at the invitation of Amazing's editor. The fact that he was unwary enough to buy that first story may lead to certain complications neither of us can foresee . . .

If I can swing it, you readers are going to see a lot more words by me in future issues of this magazine. Howard Browne

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