3,000,000 Words

There are 880,000 words in the Bible; 940,000 in the complete works of William Shakespeare. Add these together and season with the Arabian Nights of Scheherazade; the mixture will fail to fill a pot as big as that which would contain the Revelations of a Wife, 3,000,000-word novel, longest in the world.

Revelations of a Wife began in 1915. For a short time it ran in newspapers four days a week; then readers clamored for a six-day diet. Without interruption it continued, through war and normalcy, to tell of the problems of Dicky Graham, temperamental artist, and his wife, Madge--800 words a day for 13 years. Today it has a million readers in 200 newspapers (including the Chicago Evening Post, Indianapolis Star, Minneapolis Star, Buffalo Times, Erie, Pa., Times). Syndicated by the Newspaper Feature Service, Inc., of Manhattan, it has also been translated into Spanish for El Mundo of Havana, Cuba.

Its author is a plump, merry woman with a daughter at Smith College, a son at Yale, a husband in the newspaper business. As Mrs. Nana Springer White, she lives comfortably at Hempstead, Long Island. As Miss Adele Garrison, she is an oracle on marital problems for hundreds of her readers. Her own life has taught her to use her typewriter to produce what U. S. women like. Born in Clinton Junction, Wis., she became school teacher in Milwaukee, assistant Sunday editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel, feature writer and reporter for the Chicago Examiner and Chicago American.

The present phase of Revelations of a Wife is entitled "Love's Embers" and Mrs. White is planning yet another phase in which "the embers will be reblown into a faint flame." Mrs. White has no intentions of letting the story be snuffed out; in fact, she says: "The exigencies of this novel forbid that they ever shall become real ashes." How she creates these exigencies, day after day, year after year, has been a mystery to many an author. Her method is to introduce into the normal lives of Artist Dicky Graham and Madge a series of domestic disturbers, devilish dervishes, droll dolts. But, always, Sentiment is the essential ingredient in Revelations of a Wife. It appeals, not to shopgirls who want a seduction in every chapter, but to housewives and clubwomen who read more fiction than any other group of U. S. inhabitants.*

* Last fortnight, for example, a Chicago woman wrote Mrs. White that she had not missed an installment since 1915.