A frequent contributor to such high-quality magazines as Scribner's, Harper's, and the Saturday Evening Post, Maxwell Struthers Burt (who usually signed his works Struthers Burt) was a popular short-story writer, novelist, and occasional poet. A Princeton graduate, he deals invariably with the affluent and the genteel, yet he is a writer who is often equally concerned with the beauty and the romantic virtues of the American West. As a result, the reader finds in his works an interesting union of romantic individualism and the refined, orderly world of eastern society and tradition.

Burt was born in Baltimore on 18 October 1882, the son of Horace Brooke Burt, a lawyer, and Hester Ann Jones, but he stressed the fact that he was, in fact, a Philadelphian (he was taken to Philadelphia when he was six months old). Though there were six generations of American-Welsh Baptist ministers on his mother's side, one...