The Main Man of Liberty


"Anthony Abbot" in Liberty, 1937

During the 1930s, popular weekly magazines such as Collier's, Liberty, and The Saturday Evening Post waged a hot and profitable war in the quest for the reading public's weekly five-cent pieces and undying allegiance. The Post had most of the advantages, offering better pay to its writers and locking up most of the first-class illustrators, including Norman Rockwell. But Liberty kept pace, and for a brief time even chalked up a larger circulation. The secret weapon was its editor (and under a host of pseudonyms, a prolific writer), a journalist of real genius: Fulton Oursler. The library has long been the repository for the extensive body of Oursler's papers donated by his son, Fulton Oursler, Jr., and the Yale University Library some years ago gave us the original manuscript of Oursler's religious bestseller, The Greatest Story Ever Told. Recently the Fordham University Library agreed to transfer to Georgetown the extensive collection of scrapbooks kept by Oursler and his wife, Grace Perkins Oursler-herself an accomplished and prolific writer-for more than three decades.

The scrapbooks contain a wealth of personal memorabilia including extensive documentation of Fulton's interests in magic and the occult, but more importantly they provide a running history of both the Ourslers' literary careers as occasional writers, playwrights, and novelists (Fulton wrote a series of successful mysteries under the pseudonym "Anthony Abbot," Grace wrote, also under a pseudonym, the novel that was the basis for Barbara Stanwyck's first Hollywood starring vehicle, among many others). Contracts, typescripts, magazine tear-sheets, photographs, and correspondence all contribute parts of a fascinating story that reaches its peak with Fulton's editorship of Liberty. Working in a style we can easily understand today though it was a great novelty in his, Oursler rarely went to New York, choosing instead to remain at Sandalwood, his home in West Falmouth, Massachusetts, and editing 11 of the magazines-of which Liberty was one-in Bernarr MacFadden's publishing empire. He communicated through the medium of teletype messages to the office staffs in New York. To date several hundred scrapbooks have been transferred; when the shipments are completed the library will have the basis for a long-overdue biographical study of one of the 20th century's truly great journalists and writers.