Arthur O. Friel - How he became an author

[Wouldn't you know it, just after i finish posting what i found on Arthur O. Friel, i run across some more information on him. I guess updating the older post won't be good, so I'll be posting additional information in new posts and linking back to them from the original article.]

He’s talking about how he broke into the writing business, and how he came to write his first book “King of Kearsarge” 

"WHEN I wrote my first 'piece for the printer,' it was a hunting tale. I had entered high school, and somehow the editor of the school magazine heard of me and cajoled me into writing a story. It was published as it stood. So, at the age of fifteen, I had broken into print."

"The next year, in another school (I was in four different high schools before reaching college) I wrote more stories, outdoor tales, all. It became a habit. The climax came when I drifted back to New Hampshire, and, entering the Manchester High School as a senior, was speedily appointed editor-in-chief of a newly-created school magazine."

"The Red Gods of old Kearsarge Mountain stood nobly by me then. I had returned to them many a time in the long summer vacations, as well as in the snowbound winter; and in my hour of need they came and whispered things that filled my blank pages with vivid yarns. When school days ended I paid them their just tribute. I went back among them for another summer, living alone in the wilderness, and listening to their wise precepts. My friends called me crazy for living thus alone. But they did not understand. They did not know my gods.”

"From the forests I emerged at length to enter Yale. Summer newspaper work followed, and for years I saw little of my mountains. Then, having attained my degree, I returned again to the gods of the wild, finding their simple welcome and serene wisdom unchanged. And now, for the first time, they told me to write – to write of Kearsarge."

Source:

“Arthur O. Friel”, Arthur O. Friel, “Brief Biographies of Some Well-Known Authors and Illustrators”, The Penn Publishing Company Philadelphia