During an interview with the city editor of the Daily News, Vincent Starrett was offered a weekly wage of $19, which was duly accepted.  At that time, he was contemplating marrying his girlfriend, Lillian Hartsig, and the extra cash would certainly be useful.  His routine now involved a 5.30am rise and a lengthy commute to the office.  It took him a considerable time to become acclimatised to this new more stringent regime.  However, he was in illustrious company which included, amongst others, Ben Hecht and Carl Sandburg.  Three years later, in 1909, he married Lillian Hartsig, who preferred an active social life to the more mundane and domestic undertones of married life.  The union was fractious for some fifteen years before leading to an unsurprising separation.  During this period, Vincent belonged to the Chicago Press Club and divided his time between work, scouring the second-hand bookshops for desirable acquisitions and his fledgling literary career.  As a merciful release from reporting on murder cases which ranged from bizarre to hideous, Starrett was sent to Washington in 1914, as a political correspondent.  In the course of this foray, the Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan and Starrett developed an intense dislike of each other.  Bryan is the only man he is said to have truly and genuinely detested and duly wrote of him as a "forbidding fanatic, with approximately the culture and intelligence of a Tennessee snake-handler."  He did, however, have one urgent item of business.

Vincent Starrett (X) amongst a group of journalists on war correspondence assignment in Mexico, 1914.

William Jennings Bryan:  U.S. Secretary of State: Starrett wrote "I had to interview this imminent fathead daily for weeks and I never got any other impression of him other than one of portentous ignorance, egotism and vulgarity."

Ambrose Bierce in 1982.  His disappearance in Mexico greatly shocked Starrett who had an intense admiration for the writer. 
The exact circumstances of his demise have never been discovered.  It is most likely he was killed by the forces of Pancho Villa.

Franklin D. Roosevelt who perused the Washington bookshops with Starrett.

Roosevelt too, at this time, was serving as a war correspondent in Mexico. reporting on the unrest in that region.  One bizarre episode, covered so eloquently in his autobirgraphy, Born in a Bookshop, details his actual wounding in a firefight, concocted by the journalists present, anxious for copy.  An unfortunate result of this was the fatal injuries sustained by two soldiers, an    event   which haunted Starrett to his death.    He wrote of the time "I was beginning to tire of it all.  Nothing greatly interested me except the books I was collecting and the magazine stories I was trying to write.  The glamour of newspaper work had vanished.  I know now that I had stayed in the profession too long; five years would have been enough....." (Born in a Bookshop).  The Chicago literary renaissance of the second and third decades of the twentieth century brought him into contact with several individuals who were ultimately to have a profojnd effect on his live.  Billy McGee and Pascal Covici, Walter M. Hill and Edwin B. Hill published most of his work during the period between 1918 and 1929.  Edwin Bliss Hill (1866-1949) is a fascinating character, who much enjoyed Starrett's writing and printer many of these, in limited editions.  Owning the longest running private printing press in U.S. history, Hill was a gov ernment employee and a hobby printer, working off Excelsior and Caxton presses and, of Fifteen more poems  (1927),   Starrett  noted   "it   took   E.B.H.  a 

It was thought that he  might have been  taken prisoner  and  might    still be held captive in some stinking Mexican jail.  All this Miss Christiansen told me in confidence; then suddenly she relented and permitted me to make the story public.  To me, it seemed a more important matter than the war in Europe and I lost no time in putting it on the wire.  My short dispatch, which appeared on the first page of the Daily News next day was a clean news beat, but it did not allay the disappointment I felt at missing Ambrose Bierce.   Thereafter, I saw Miss Christiansen a number of times, and we corresponded almost to the day of her death."  It was during one of his forays into the second-hand book stores of Washington that Starrett met and fell into conversation with Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Jack London who served as a war correspondent in Mexico alongside Vincent Starrett.

year  to do this on his hand press -since  then I have given the poor fellow only leaflets."  In Charles Hone's quirky Starrett Bibliography, A Vincent Starrett Library, Hill is personified as "either you or I should say something  about the E.B. Hill pamphlets.  They are a small division   in   themselves.     Hill  is  an   enchantingly bookish fellow, broke like myself, who owns a small hand press in Ysleta, Texas (he's moving to Arizona soon.).  Over the years he has done a lot of other things  too,  of  course;  his bibliography  would  be  a volume.  But whenever I had any trifle of my own, or some uncollected bit by one of the big shots, that seemed to suggest a pleasant leaflet, I've sent it to him; hence the Barrie, Conrad, Houseman, et al. things I'm now sending you.  Indicentally, these are genuine firsts and excessively rare, as you might imagine.  It's been a very happy partnership of a sort for years.  All the printings are part of my perennial quest for ana..."

"One of the first things I did in Washington, when I had a free evening, was to call upon Ambrose Bierce. This was the intention anyway; but when I established a connection it was not with Bierce that I spoke. Major Bierce, said his secretary, was not in Washington.  It was  a  disappointment.   For  years   I had been looking forward to meeting with the author of Tales of soldiers and civilians, with whom a few years before I had exchanged letters.  He was one of the highest peaks in my whole mountain range of literary idols, and the prospect of meeting him in Washington had helped to make my assignment exciting.  Something about my breathless inquiry and my obvious disappointment must have touched the secretary, for she invited me to call.      I  went at once to the hotel  and  I  learned to my dismay that Ambrose  Bierce  had  disappeared in Mexico nearly a year before.   The   circumstances   had   not been made public by the family; still hoping to hear from him: and the information   came  out  slowly,    for  Miss      Carrie Christiansen was aware that I was a newspaper reporter.  She was immensely kind, however, and sensing my admiration told me the story as far as she knew it.  Nearling his seventy first birthday and afflicted with asthma, the remarkable old man had suddenly decided to visit Mexico during the winter of 1913, hoping to meet the revolutionary leader Francisco Villa, whom he admired.  Several letters had been received from him en route and a final letter had been received by his daughter Helen shortly after his arrival in the southern republic.  It appeared that he had joined a division of Villa's army and mention was made of a prospective advance to Ojinaga.  And that was all; the rest was silence.  This had been the last word to any member of his immediate circle, and it is still the last direct word from the man himself.  His daughter and his secretary were hoping that there would be another communication and fearing the tidings it might contain.  Quiet efforts had been made to trace the writer's movements i.by the State Department and the War Department had also taken a hand in the search,.

I'm delighted to have so many of the queer little firsts to send you.  When they appeared, I sent out copies to those who in my opinion might really care for them - not too many - and put away a handful for such friends as might later care to have them."  The majority of these leaflets and pamphlets are now amongst the most desirable and elusive items eagerly sought after by collectors like myself.

Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett was born to Robert Polk Starrett and Margaret Deniston Starrett (nee Young) on 26th October 1886 at No. 26 Oxford Street, Toronto, Canada.  His parents had been married in 1884 and Vincent was the first of four sons.  In 1890, when Margaret was expectant   with their   second child,    Robert moved the family to Chicago where he joined the department store of Carson, Pirie & Scott as accountant, remaining in this job until his death on 24th November 1918.  The move resulted from a desire to  improve on the  growing  family's standard of living.
Robert Starrett had a fondness for alcohol and was not averse to indulging in physical confrontation when he deemed necessary.  On the other hand, his wife was deeply religious woman and immersed herself in the affairs of Church.  She died in 1935, ironically, on board ship on her way to missionary work in Canada.  Nevertheless, the young Vincent was incredibly fortunate that his literary development was encouraged by both parents.  In due course, he assembled an impressive fledgling library, assisted by his aunts who supplied books, as did his grandfather, owner of a bookstore in Oxford Street in Toronto.  There can be no doubt that the time he spent in his grandfather's shop helped lay the foundation stone of his literary career.  The bookstore wound up with the death of his grandfather and Toronto probably never again held the same allure. 
In 1904, when aged seventees, Vincent abandoned his education and, with a school friend, Jack Chandler, decided to embark on a life of adventure.  Departing on a circuitous trip to the Amazon, their combined funds of $40 dissipated rapidly, ultimately leading to the curtailment of this ambitious endeavour and, crestfallen, they headed back to Chicago.

After a various assortment of odd jobs, he took work as a deckhand on a cattle ship destined for London.  In England, funds were again rapidly eroded and a stint in the Salvation Army delivered Vincent from total destitution - a situation which persisted for several months.  When he discovered that the shipping company were obliged to offer a working passage home, he gladly grasped this unexpected opportunity and returned to New York.  He eventually arrived back in Chicago in 1905, with financial assistance from his parents.

This period marked the most prolific of his life, including a voluminous cannon of pulp fiction.  Many of the popular detective pulps of the day bought his stories but, with grinding frustration, a large percentage of his writing hit a stone wall  of rejection.  Such was his oeuvre that the market                    become

saturated with his work and, as a consequence, income was scarce.  When his marriage broke up, his home was crammed with books and his wife frustrated with financial uncertainty, Vincent sold his Arthur Machen collection to Charles Parsons for the not inconsiderable sum of $2,000.  On their separation, this unselfish gesture provided Lillian with a degree of monetary security.

The Chicago Renaissance, as the term is generally utilised, refers to the second great wave of Chicago literary output and covers a period of about fifteen years, between 1910 and 1925.  Major players included, aside from Starrett, Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, Harriet Monroe, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Floyd Dell, Margaret Anderson, Edgar Lees Masters.  These are only a handful of those whose contribution cannot be understated.  Little magazines, such as The Wave (Starrett & Hinrichson), Poetry (Harriet Monroe), Little Review (Margaret Anderson) and Friday Literary Review (Floyd Dell) all  sprung up during this period, which certainly did not lack for creative ideas.  Vincent Starrett modestly understates his own part; "my own contribution to "The Renascence" was modest.  It was a nondescript little magazine called The Wave, copies of which I understand are now rare and even desirable.    At any