Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

by George Horace Lorimer

Overview

Dear Pierrepont: Your Ma got back safe this morning and she wants me to be sure to tell you not to over-study, and I want to tell you to be sure not to under-study. What we're really sending you to Harvard for is to get a little of the education that's so good and plenty there. When it's passed around you don't want to be bashful, but reach right out and take a big helping every time, for I want you to get your share. You'll find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and the screw-driver lost. I didn't have your advantages when I was a boy, and you can't have mine. Some men learn the value of money by not having any and starting out to pry a few dollars loose from the odd millions that are lying around; and some learn it by having fifty thousand or so left to them and starting out to spend it as if it were fifty thousand a year. Some men learn the value of truth by having to do business with liars; and some by going to Sunday School. Some men learn the cussedness of whiskey by having a drunken father; and some by having a good mother. Some men get an education from other men and newspapers and public libraries; and some get it from professors and parchments-it doesn't make any special difference how you get a half-nelson on the right thing, just so you get it and freeze on to it. The package doesn't count after the eye's been attracted by it, and in the end it finds its way to the ash heap. It's the quality of the goods inside which tells, when they once get into the kitchen and up to the cook. You can cure a ham in dry salt and you can cure it in sweet pickle, and when you're through you've got pretty good eating either way, provided you started in with a sound ham. If you didn't, it doesn't make any special difference how you cured it-the ham-tryer's going to strike the sour spot around the bone. And it doesn't make any difference how much sugar and fancy pickle you soak into a fellow, he's no good unless he's sound and sweet at the core.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781979020961
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	01/29/2018
Pages:	138
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

George Horace Lorimer (October 6, 1867 - October 22, 1937) was an American journalist and author. He is best known as the editor of The Saturday Evening Post. During his editorial reign, the Post rose from a circulation of several thousand to over a million. He is credited with promoting or discovering a large number of American writers, e.g. Jack London.




Lorimer was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of the Rev. George C. Lorimer and Belle Burford Lorimer. He attended Moseley High School in Chicago, Colby College, and Yale University. In 1899 he became editor-in-chief of The Saturday Evening Post, and remained in charge until the last day of 1936, about a year before his death from throat cancer. He served also as vice president, president, and chairman of Curtis Publishing Company, which publishes the Post.




In the early 1900s Lorimer published several books, including




Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son,




being the Letters written by John Graham, Head of the House of Graham & Company, Pork-Packers in Chicago, familiarly known on 'Change as "Old Gorgon Graham," to his Son, Pierrepont, facetiously known to his intimates as "Piggy."

Editorial Reviews

Perhaps this book was a big hit when it first appeared in 1902, but it is preachy and unquaintly old-fashioned to the contemporary reader. Lorimer was an editor at the Saturday Evening Post, and this appears to be nothing more than a puffed-up piece from that magazine. The first ``letter,'' written to Pierrepont Graham, a freshman at Harvard, by his pork-packing father in Chicago, contains all sorts of fatherly advice about college life, and what a young man should and should not do. But, as Pierrepont ages and goes to work in Dad's company, the homilies continue with few variations, and the folksy examples (one per chapter) of how not to behave, plus endless metaphors, become boring, and the book's conceit wears thin. There is much advice (indeed, that is all the book contains), but as Graham senior himself notes, it is the same advice that young men always hear. However, there are a few bright spots. Graham's rules for business conversation are useful and still timely: ``Have something to say. Say it. Stop talking.'' (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

These fictional correspondences first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and were collected into a single volume in 1902. With its portraits of small-town life, humor, and wisdom, this title was a huge success at a time when our country was a simpler place. Today, this serves as a sterling piece of Americana.

Library Journal