Sales ran into the millions and his most popular collection, "It Takes a Heap o' Livin'," sold more than a million copies by itself. More books followed, and before he was done Guest had filled more than 20. They escaped the limits of their type case with the third book, published in 1914, but Guest had some misgivings about the large press run - 3,500 copies. Two years later, in 1911 and still working in eight-page morsels, they printed "Just Glad Things," but upped the press order to 1,500 copies. They printed 800 copies of a 136-page book, "Home Rhymes." Harry could set as many as eight pages - provided the verses didn't have too many "e's" in them - before he had to print what he had and break up the forms for eight more pages. They were in the book publishing business.Īfter supper, Harry climbed the stairs to the attic to set Eddie's poetry. Guest talked it over his younger brother Harry, a typesetter, and they bought a case of type. They asked where they could find collections of his folksy verses. From that day forward, nearly all of his writing was in meter and rhyme. In 1908, standing in the rain as the solitary mourner for one such journalist who had long since been forgotten and relegated to the newspaper's morgue, Guest resolved to escape that fate by becoming a specialist. Verse had always been part of Guest's writing, but he had more or less followed the workaday road of many newsmen for 10 years. More contributions of verse and observations led to a weekly column, "Blue Monday Chat," and then a daily column, "Breakfast Table Chat." But Mosley decided to publish the verse, His verse ran on Dec. The Free Press was choosy about publishing the literary efforts of staff members and Guest, a 17-year-old dropout, might have been seen as something of an upstart. Guest figured he might just as well write verse as clip it and submitted one of his own, a dialect verse, to Sunday editor Arthur Mosley. It was his job to cull timeless items from the newspapers with which the Free Press exchanged papers for use as fillers. It did not occur to Guest to write in verse until late in 1898 when he was working as assistant exchange editor. to 3 a.m.īy the end of that year - the year he should have been completing high school - Guest had a reputation as a scrappy reporter in a competitive town. He quickly worked his way through the labor beat - a much less consequential beat than it is today - the waterfront beat and the police beat, where he worked "the dog watch" - 3 p.m. Three years after he joined the Free Press, Guest became a cub reporter. In those six decades, Detroit underwent half a dozen identity changes, but Eddie Guest became a steadfast character on the changing scene. In 1895, the year before Henry Ford took his first ride in a motor carriage, Eddie Guest signed on with the Free Press as a 13-year-old office boy. He was pretty popular in the US because of his light, optimistic style.Įdgar Albert Guest Nationality and his Early Life From his first published work in the Detroit Free Press until his death in 1959, Guest wrote approximately 11,000 poems. In 1902 he became an American naturalized citizen. His first published poem first appeared in Detroit Free Pass, the biggest newspaper in Detroit in which he worked there as a copy boy and a reporter later, on 11 December 1898. In 1891, his family moved from England to Detroit, Michigan, where Guest lived until he died. Guest was born in Birmingham, England in 1881. His poems often had an inspirational and optimistic view of everyday life. Edgar Albert Guest was a British-born American poet who became known as the People's Poet.
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