|
Four of the best selling novels in 1903 were
The Little shepherd of Kingdom by
John Fox, Mrs Wiggs of the...by
Alice Caldwell Hegan, The Virginian
by Owen Wister and the second novel, The
Pit, in
Frank Norris' unfinished trilogy,
The Epic of the Wheat.
The Pit is said to have been based on the
efforts of Chicagoan
Joseph Leiter to corner the
wheat market in 1897–1898. Joseph Leiter was a
personal friend of Iroquois manager,
Will J. Davis.
A shorter version of the work, "The Pit: A
Romance in Chicago" ran as a series in
the Saturday Evening Post in late 1902
and the full version was published as a bound
book in January, 1903 after Norris died from a
burst appendix. Leiter wasn't the pioneer
of grain cornering in Chicago. That honor
went to Benjamin P. Hutchinson, the father of an
Iroquois Theater fire survivor,
Helen Hutchinson Lancaster. "Old
Hutch" had manipulated the wheat market for
millions a decade earlier, in 1888. As
models go, Hutchison would not have served
Norris's theme as well as Leiter. Both
Hutchinson and Leiter had made and lost fortunes
as grain traders but in contrast with Leiter's
loss of ten-million
dollars of his father's money, Hutchinson was a
self-made curmudgeon who made two fortunes and
gambled away one. In Chicago probably few
would have argued that he would have made a
third had he lived long enough.
|
|
Joseph Leiter joined in Iroquois Theater manager's honeymoon excursion party
A July 3, 1907 story in The Breckenridge News,
a Cloverport, KY newspaper, described an auto tour
in the Louisville area on July 1 with Will J. Davis and
his second bride,
Mary Ellen (his secretary of fifteen years, to
whom he had been married for two weeks), New York
theater manager
George W. Lederer and his wife, and
Joseph Leiter.
The five of them spent Jun 30, 1907 at the Seelbach
Hotel▼1 in Louisville and July 1 at the Pate House in
Cloverport.
|
|
Discrepancies and addendum
1.
The Seelbach, today a four-star Hilton with old style elegance, was only
two years old in 1907. Eighteen years later F. Scott
Fitzgerald would use it as the backdrop for Tom and
Daisy Buchanan's wedding in The Great Gatsby.
Yours truly stayed there a few times around
Christmas in the late 1980s. It was lovely
with marble everywhere and the beautifully
holiday-decorated Stewarts department store
across the street. Stewarts brought back 1950s
childhood memories of Christmas shopping at the
Marshall Field's store in Chicago.
|
