Books: Authors to the Road

The U. S. loves to be lectured. For no years it has been paying countless U. S. and British writers to exhort, educate and berate it. It all started in 1826, when Josiah Holbrook of Connecticut and the lyceum movement began the long, uncomfortable cross-country trips of uncertain financial return and doubtful educational value that have come to be known as lecture tours.

And it still goes on. Last fortnight, Nobel Prizewinner Sinclair Lewis strode jerkily onto a platform in Manhattan, and with hands in pockets, galvanic shrugs and many a wisecrack, proceeded to deliver his eighth lecture of the season. An explosive, rapid-fire attack on stage censorship, Reds, Fascists and Ernest Hemingway, the lecture was entitled It Has Happened Here. Next month he will repeat his performance in Albuquerque, N. Mex. That same week in Upper Montclair, N. J., Salvador de Madariaga will be going on about The Future of Liberty, and Ludwig Lewisohn will be holding forth on books. In Grand Rapids, Walter Pitkin (Life Begins at Forty) will be talking on The Art of Relaxation, and in Brooklyn, Dr. Houston Peterson (The Melody of Chaos) will discuss Aldous Huxley. Martha Gellhorn talks that week in Chicago, Younghill Kang (The Grass Roof) in Wheeling, W. Va., and Captain John D. Craig (Adventure in Haiti) in Ann Arbor, Mich. In addition there will be a number of lectures belonging to the Great Question Mark school of public speaking, with David Seabury in Detroit asking What Makes Us Seem So Queer?; John T. Flynn in Elizabeth, N. J., What's the Matter With Us Now?; Stanley High in Boston, Where Do We Go From Here?; and Vicki Baum in Salt Lake City, Why Be Afraid? The week when all this takes place will be exceptional but not unique for its lecturing activity. A banner season for lectures, the winter of 1937-38 will see about 200 authors giving 10,000 lectures to audiences of approximately 2,000,000 listeners—not counting the performances of magicians, mimes, dancers, mystics, chalk-talk artists and world travelers who still do business with lantern slides.

For writers whose income from books is uncertain and fluctuating, lecturing is still what it was in Emerson's day: a profitable sideline. But rates have changed since Emerson was glad to speak for $5 and oats for his horse. Last month H. G. Wells spoke seven times, made $21,000. Next spring Thomas Mann will get $15,000 for his 15 lectures. For the 23 lectures on Sinclair Lewis' crowded schedule, he will get $23,000. Although their agent makes the rates of such headliners as Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt and Aldous Huxley a carefully guarded secret, their net return will probably not equal the $33,000 that Dale Carnegie will be paid for his 55 inspirational talks in 55 towns.

But most of the 200 writers who give the U. S. its surfeit of literary talk get no such fees. In the declining scale of rates, a best-selling author like Dorothea Brande (Wake Up and Live!) can count on getting $500 a lecture, while best-selling writers of the stature of Carl Carmer (Stars Fell on Alabama) are quoted at $200. The majority of lectures are delivered at prices ranging between $100 and $200, and in the case of impromptu readings of poets or proletarian novelists to radical groups, rates finally taper off to $5 an evening or just for fun.