When he was a year old, the family moved to Bentonsport, Iowa, where the father owned a store and a farm. After the Civil War the family moved to Xenia, Ill. There Paine attended a one-room school, writing "compositions" for the weekly "literary" exercises. At 20 he went to St. Louis, learned photography, travelled for three years through the South with camera and then set himself up as a dealer in photographic supplies in Fort Scott, Kan. He kept this up for ten years, but wrote, too, and his first book, Rhymes by Two Friends (1893), was a collaboration with William Allen White. Richard Harding Davis accepted a Paine story for Harper's Weekly, and this decided him to turn author in earnest, and in 1895 he sold his photographic business and went to New York. Paine wrote fiction, humor, verse and edited several magazines, but his outstanding work was a three-volume Biography of Mark Twain, with whom he lived and traveled for four years. In addition, he wrote The Boy's Life of Mark Twain (1916) and A Short Life of Mark Twain (1920). He was Twain's literary executor and arranged for publication of Mark Twain's Letters (1917). Thomas Nast - His Period and His Pictures (1904) was Mr. Paine's first biography. He also wrote lives of Lillian Gish, Captain Bill MacDonald of the Texas Rangers and George F. Baker, New York banker. Mr. Paine lived for several years in France and wrote Joan of Arc, Maid of France and The Girl in White Armor, works which brought him from the French Government the decoration of Chevalier in the Legion of Honor. His travel books, all widely circulated, included The Car That Went Abroad, The Ship Dwellers and The Tent Dwellers. His first novel was The Bread Line (1900) and he followed it in 1901 with The Great White Way, a title for Broadway and New York's theatrical district that came into general use. He also produced skits, sketches and a steady string of books for children, the Hollow Tree, Arkansas Bear and Deep Woods, the first of which were produced in the 1890's. |
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