Bethel Merriday

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No character in this novel is the portrait of an actual person, and if there is any resemblance to the name of a real person, it is accidental.

Such notices as this have become increasingly familiar because of an increasing habit among readers of finding themselves portrayed in every novel, and of being annoyed or unduly pleased. It is particularly necessary in this book because in recent years I have been acquainted with six summer theatres and with a touring play. I declare vigorously that the Nutmeg Players of Point Grampion, in my tale, are not drawn from the Stockbridge, Cohasset, Ogunquit, Provincetown, Clinton, or Skowhegan companies, and that the tour of a Romeo and Juliet company, here chronicled, is not the history of my Angela Is Twenty-Two. And Sladesbury is not Hartford, but the county seat of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.

I hope that this signboard may have some effect. After the appearance of Arrowsmith I was informed that at least half my medical characters had been drawn from professors of whom I had never heard. With It Can't Happen Here, adherents of two editors, one in Vermont and one in Connecticut, gave rather convincing proof that each of these gentlemen was the model for Doremus Jessup. But the happy days were with Elmer Gantry when, on the same Sunday morning, in the same Western city, each of two clergymen announced from his pulpit that the Reverend Elmer had been drawn solely from him, but that the portrait was crooked.

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