Although he visited France and wrote a novel, They Had to See Paris (1926), about his experiences there, Homer Croy, a Midwestern novelist and humorist, never associated with the other American writers in Paris. Croy was born and raised on a farm near Maryville, Missouri; after graduating from high school, he began his writing career by working as a cub reporter for the St. Joseph Gazette and the St. Joseph Press. He attended the University of Missouri, supporting himself in part as a correspondent for the Kansas City Star, and went on to work for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch before moving to New York. In New York, Croy worked under Theodore Dreiser, then an editor at Butterick Publications, and also wrote his first novel, When to Lock the Stable (1914), which was a modest critical and financial success. The outbreak of World War I found him in India preparing newsreels...