The Founding of the Authors’ League of America

This article was published in the Fall/Winter 2012 issue of The Authors Guild Bulletin. Guild members can access the digital archive here.

The small band of professionals who conjured the Authors’ League of America into existence of the course of a handful of meetings in the second decade of the 20th century seem to have been too busy talking their peers into joining them to keep much of a record of their early efforts. Their goals, however, were clear, their rhetoric a high-flown reflection of the progressive spirit of the day, and by December 1912, the “urgent necessity” of forming a league “for the mutual protection and information of authors in their dealings with publishers” had enough support from writers around the country to translate idea into fact. Five names were listed on the articles of incorporation: Rex Beach, Gelett Burgess, Ellis Parker Butler, Rupert Hughes and Arthur C. Train, but they were backed by dozens more, many of them equally prominent.

By the time the League held its first annual meeting, on April 8, 1913, some 350 dues-paying members had signed on and the turnout exceeded all expectations. “[M]ore than 100 professional authors who get real money for their output gathered at the Hotel Astor yesterday afternoon,” The New York Times reported the next day, “on the occasion of the first annual meeting of the recently organized Authors’ League of America . . . organized for the purpose of protecting the American author against the rapacity of some dishonest publishers.

“[The League] aims not only to protect authors from dishonest publishers but to protect the honest publisher from the dishonest one, and authors from one another, and from the inevitable lawyers’ fees and mounting costs that follow in the wake of a law suit.”

There were delegations from Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston and Indianapolis, widespread amity, and a brief but heated exchange between two members who had considered submitting their dispute to League arbitration. (The aggrieved party announced at the meeting that she had decided to sue instead.)

The first issue of the Bulletin appeared soon after, containing a complete list of current members, along with their hometowns and qualifying work. A quarter of the founding members were women—seven years before they won the right to vote—and in the tradition of the day, a parenthetical Mrs. or Miss follows each of the 94 names.

The League’s early lineup of elected officers and Council members was dazzling, beginning with its first president, the American writer Winston Churchill, whose eight-volume historical novel Richard Carvel sold an estimated two million copies and was adapted for the theater and, a few years later, for film. A two-term New Hampshire state assemblyman and an unsuccessful candidate for governor on the Progressive ticket, Churchill was so celebrated as an author at the turn of the century that his British namesake, younger by three years and 20 days, wrote to him volunteering to add a middle initial to his own byline to avoid confusion—and did.

Theodore Roosevelt—yes, that Theodore Roosevelt—agreed to stand for vice-president of the League within a month or two of losing his last presidential campaign to Woodrow Wilson. While his name on the letterhead surely burnished the League’s reputation, and he more than qualified as an author, his greatest value was as a champion of copyright. As president five years earlier, Roosevelt had pressed Congress to pass a reform bill written by the Copyright Office, and the result, the landmark Copyright Act of 1909, was one of a handful of bills he signed the day he left the White House, before boarding a train to New York and his next career, as editor of The Outlook.

Ellis Parker Butler, whose 1905 short story “Pigs Is Pigs” had made him a household name at the age of 35, served as both secretary and treasurer, and he and Arthur Train appear to have been the main engines of the League in its first 10 years. Though Butler’s stats suggest a model of the single-minded writer—he published more than 30 books and thousands of short stories, poems and essays—like T. S. Eliot, he worked full-time as a banker. Between those two demanding careers, he seems to have found an inordinate number of hours to devote to the League, serving on the Bulletin Committee for many years—we suspect he wrote much of the copy—and in 1916–1917 becoming the driving force behind the Authors League Fund, founded to assist needy writers.

Among the more prominent members of the League’s first Council were Rex Beach, Hamlin Garland, Ellen Glasgow, Jack London, Cleveland Moffett, Ida M. Tarbell, Booth Tarkington, Kate Douglas Wiggin and Jesse Lynch Williams. Tarbell, whose oil industry exposé, The History of the Standard Oil Company, had galvanized public opinion regarding the regulation of corporations, served on the board’s seven-member executive committee tasked with directing the group’s activities.

Looking Out for the Business Interests of Professional Writers

The League’s goals were nothing if not ambitious: “To procure adequate copyright legislation, both international and domestic, to protect the rights of all authors, whether engaged in literary, dramatic, or musical composition, and to advise and assist all such authors voluntarily in the disposal of their productions.”

It was a tall order, suited to a precarious profession: “[T]he author,” the founders announced in the first issue of the Bulletin, “is perhaps the only seller who is forced to grant an exclusive and unlimited option on his wares to a prospective buyer.” The League’s founders understood that ordinary writers, even those experienced in dealing with publishers and contracts, could not be expected to know the nitty-gritty details of copyright, serial rights, foreign publications, and other contractual terms without professional advice. It was the League’s job to provide it.

Though the League took pains to emphasize that it was not “an aggressive or pugnacious association which is looking for trouble,” its oft reiterated intention to protect authors from “a certain class of publishers who systematically take advantage of their ignorance” gave some writers pause. In the June 1913 issue, the Bulletin ran a letter from the writer Margaret Deland, who had delayed joining for several months, as she did “not want to ally myself with any organization whose existence is in any way a criticism upon publishers as a class.” Assured that this was not the case, she eventually joined.

Staffed by a handful of volunteers, the infant League was precocious in its rollout of departments and bureaus meant to demonstrate its usefulness to members. Most important of these-and the heart of its mission-was the Legal Department, which helped writers secure the best possible terms in their book contracts, aided members in disputes, and distributed information about authors’ legal rights. The League did not “attempt to negotiate such contracts, since these must always remain a personal matter between author and publisher,” but its championing of writers’ rights quickly led it into legal and contractual advocacy, and to a focus on the financial concerns of writers.

Copyright was a major and overriding concern, on which the Bulletin offered regular guidance, with articles on how to register a copyright, details about foreign copyright laws, and reports of copyright pirates caught and convicted.

Contracts were equally important, and the League sought to establish uniformity from the start, its ultimate goal being the industry-wide adoption of a standard contract.

In a parallel effort to bring organization to the wild west of the magazine industry, the League pursued “definite terms” for the sale of a manuscript to a periodical, announcing in the third issue of the Bulletin that several magazine editors had been persuaded to enter an agreement with the League, “whereby manuscripts submitted by members and bearing the official seal, showing membership in The Authors’ League, will be accepted and paid for on definite terms.” Among the periodicals that had agreed to the League’s terms were Harper’s Magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, McClure’s Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post and The Blue Book.

Eager to keep members informed and their interests protected, the League sent representatives to the conference of the American Booksellers’ Association, reported on news of importance to radio play writers, issued alerts on moving-picture rights and reported on literary life abroad in the occasional Bulletin sections “London Notes” and “Paris Notes.” It engaged the services of a London agent to sell British publication rights for League members at the low commission of 5 percent (British agency fees were typically 10-20 percent at the time), and supported the Publishers’ Co-Operative Bureau, a group of 24 publishers who banded together “to increase the sale and reading of all books published in the United States and Canada.” The League sympathized with the group’s project, lamenting that “A man who will give up $5 for two theatre tickets, or a bottle of champagne, will refuse to pay the same amount of money for books of permanent value and unending interest. The so-called criticism of books in the newspapers has fallen far below the level of mediocrity. Book pages are shunned not only because of this, but for their dreary appearance.”

The League’s emphasis on practical aid for the writer led to the canny establishment of one of its most popular departments, the Reading Bureau for Manuscripts. “It has been thought… that this reading and criticizing bureau, endorsed by the League, carrying the guarantee of honesty and capacity, will be of great value to newcomers in the literary field, and give them encouragement as well as help.” Miss Viola Roseboro-“one of the best known literary critics in America,” straight from the pages of McClure’s Magazine—would provide members with constructive criticism of their work.

Rates were $5 for a short story of up to 7,000 words, plus 50 cents for each additional 1,000 words, and $10 for a novel of up to 100,000 words, plus $1 for each additional 5,000 words.

“Dear Miss Roseboro,” wrote one grateful client, “Perhaps it will interest you to know that you straightened me out in that story as no one else could. It was easy, too, after you showed me how. It is sold to —I almost hope I will get in trouble again over a story, so that I may see you.”

The animating spirit of the League, however, would hew forever practical-to help writers maintain their livelihoods, not perfect their craft. Over time the League’s membership would grow more numerous and more diverse, leading to its subdivision into the Authors Guild, the Dramatists Guild, and the Writers Guild (later merged with the Screen Writers Guild, the union that represents television, film and media writers). The League would weigh in on many causes of interest to members over the years, and wage many battles in their behalf, but its opening move remains hard to top. For $10 a year in dues, writers working across genres and forms, in cities and small towns across the United States, often in isolation from their peers, found themselves part of a fast-growing “union” of writers who spoke out about unfair contracts, copyright reform, and the peculiar needs of a peculiar class of workers.