Though Julie Palmer Smith was the first author to live at Esperanza, her son-in-law, William Webster Ellsworth, was a well respected author, his career at the Century Company, from its beginning’s as an offshoot of Scribner and ending as Secretary (think CEO), meant that he had a formidable network of connections.
A review of his book ‘A Golden Age of Authors’ published in 1919 by Houghton Mifflin* hints at this network; the review was by Albert Bigelow Paine*: “When the MS. arrived and I saw the size of it, I said, ‘It looks formidable but I’ll read it. I’ll do it for Ellsworth, I’ll do anything for Ellsworth.’ Then after dinner I got my clothes off, got into bed, propped up, and began. I hadn’t read three pages before I realized a remarkable thing, viz: that it was not I doing it for Ellsworth, but Ellsworth doing it for me, by the Great Inventor of Letters, yes! I was simply eating it up. I was enthralled, enslaved. I couldn’t stop. I read till late, late (I am an early bird) and at five thirty the next morning I was at it again. It was not a big MS. any more, it was too little.’
A much more interesting, and honest, book review than many!
*He had parted ways with Century Company a few years earlier, following a rather nasty personality clash with the new editors brought in after Richard Gilder’s death.
Acair Fearann 
Thank you, Anne! I recently became very interested in WW and really enjoyed this entry. I started reading the book itself last month– a stream of fascinating tidbits, especially his encounters with Jack London!
Lisa, glad you are enjoying that book! Though he comments somewhere in it, I think in the section on Jack London actually, that he didn’t keep hundreds of interesting letters from authors. Enough to make me cry.
The same urge to archive keeps me printing out my family e-mails– lest a sunspot cause servers to collapse and cyber letters to disappear without a trace. . .