University of Virginia Library

Mrs. Elia W. Peattie, whose little volume of stories entitled The Shape of Fear has just appeared, is well known throughout the West in literary and philanthropic circles. She was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the first year of the Civil War. In later years she moved to Chicago, where she married a newspaper man, Mr. Robert Burns Peattie, and was engaged in newspaper work with him for twelve years. Eight years of that time were spent in Omaha, where her husband was the managing editor of the Omaha World-Herald. She has done every sort of reporting and editorial work, and has gone as far as Alaska and the West Indies in the pursuit of her vocation. Mrs. Peattie began her literary career with a story for a newspaper competition, in which she won the thousand-dollar prize. Since then she has been a constant contributor to American magazines and periodicals, and her stories of Western life and character are gradually gaining for her a wider hearing. Two years ago Messrs. Way and Williams published A Mountain Woman by her, but it was brought out at Christmas time and was to some extent submerged. The volume just published by the Macmillan Company should do much

to impress her work more surely upon the reading public.