Bethel Merriday

NOTICE

No character in this novel is the portrait of an actual person, and if there is any resemblance to the name of a real person, it is accidental.

Such notices as this have become increasingly familiar because of an increasing habit among readers of finding themselves portrayed in every novel, and of being annoyed or unduly pleased. It is particularly necessary in this book because in recent years I have been acquainted with six summer theatres and with a touring play. I declare vigorously that the Nutmeg Players of Point Grampion, in my tale, are not drawn from the Stockbridge, Cohasset, Ogunquit, Provincetown, Clinton, or Skowhegan companies, and that the tour of a Romeo and Juliet company, here chronicled, is not the history of my Angela Is Twenty-Two. And Sladesbury is not Hartford, but the county seat of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.

I hope that this signboard may have some effect. After the appearance of Arrowsmith I was informed that at least half my medical characters had been drawn from professors of whom I had never heard. With It Can't Happen Here, adherents of two editors, one in Vermont and one in Connecticut, gave rather convincing proof that each of these gentlemen was the model for Doremus Jessup. But the happy days were with Elmer Gantry when, on the same Sunday morning, in the same Western city, each of two clergymen announced from his pulpit that the Reverend Elmer had been drawn solely from him, but that the portrait was crooked.

I shall not explain to self-elected prototypes of my Bethel Merriday or Roscoe Valentine just how I probed their own lives; and if it shall prove that there really are persons so unfortunate as to be named Zed Wintergeist or Mrs. Lumley Boyle or Mrs. J. Goddard Deacon or Jerome Jordan O'Toole or Tudor Blackwall, I shall merely point out that there is a tradition that fiction characters have to be called something.

Of course writers might call them X76 -- 4 or Pi R Square.

But if we did, all the persons with automobile licences numbered X76 -- 4 and all the coolies named Pi Lung Squong would write to us, which heaven forbid.

SINCLAIR LEWIS