George Ade

(1866-1944 / the United States)

Biography of George Ade

George Ade (February 9, 1866 – May 16, 1944) was an American writer, newspaper columnist, and playwright.

The United States, in Ade's lifetime, underwent a great population shift and transfer from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Many felt the nation suffered the even more agonizing process of shifting values toward philistinism, greed, and dishonesty. Ade's prevalent practice is to record the pragmatic efforts of the little man to get along in such a world.

Ade propounds a golden mean, satirizing both hidebound adherence to obsolete standards and too-easy adjustment to new ones. His view is often an ambiguous, ambivalent, pragmatic reaction to the changing scene, but it remains an invaluable literary reflection of the conflicting moral tensions resident in our national culture at the turn of the century.

Ade was a playwright as well as an author, penning such stage works as Artie, The Sultan of Sulu(a musical comedy), The College Widow, The Fair Co-ed, and "The County Chairman". He wrote the first American play about football.

After twelve years in Chicago, he built a home near the town of Brook, Indiana (Newton County). It soon became known for hosting a campaign stop in 1908 by William Howard Taft, a rally for Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party in 1912, and a homecoming for soldiers and sailors in 1919.

George Ade is one of the American writers whose publications made him rich. When land values were inflated about the time of World War I, Ade was a millionaire. The Ross-Ade football stadium at Purdue University was built with his (and David E. Ross's) financial support. He also generously supported his college fraternity, Sigma Chi, leading a fund-raising campaign to endow the Sigma Chi mother house at the site of the fraternity's original establishment at Miami University. Ade is also famous among Sigma Chis as the author of The Sigma Chi Creed, written in 1929, one of the central documents of the fraternity's philosophies.

George Ade died in Brook, Indiana, aged 78. He is buried in Fairlawn Cemetery in Kentland.

George Ade's Works:

* Artie. A story of the streets and town (1896)
* Pink Marsh : a story of the streets and town (1897)
* Doc' Horne (1899)
* Fables in slang (1899)
* More fables (1900)
* American vacations in Europe (1901)
* Forty modern fables (1901)
* Ki-Ram (1901)
* Girl proposition (1902)
* The County Chairman (1903)
* Handsome Cyril, or, The messenger boy with the warm feet (1903)
* In Babel; stories of Chicago (1903)
* Circus Day (1903)
* People you know (1903)
* Strenuous lad's library (1903)
* Sultan of Sulu; an original satire in two acts (1903)
* Breaking into society (1904)
* The College Widow (1904)
* Sho gun, an original comic opera in two acts (1904)
* True bills (1904)
* Round about Cairo, with and without the assistance of the dragoman or Simon Legree of the Orient (1906)
* Slim princess (1907)
* Fair co-ed (1909)
* Old town (1909)
* I Knew Him When : a Hoosier fable dealing with the happy days of away back yonder (1910)
* Hoosier hand book and true guide for the returning exile (1911)
* Verses and jingles (1911)
* Just out of college; a light comedy in three acts (1912)
* Knocking the neighbors (1913)
* Ade's fables (1914)
* Invitation to you and your folks from Jim and some more of the home folks (1916)
* Marse Covington; a play in one act (1918)
* Hand-made fables (1920)
* Single blessedness, and other observations (1922)
* Mayor and the manicure; a play in one act (1923)
* Nettie, a play in one act (1923)
* Speaking to father; a play in one act (1923)
* Father and the boys; a comedy-drama (1924)
* The Sigma Chi Creed (1929)
* On the Indiana trail (1930)
* Old-time saloon: not wet--not dry, just history (1931)
* Thirty fables in slang (1933)
* One afternoon with Mark Twain (1939)
* Notes & reminiscences (with John T. McCutcheon) (1940)

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Chicago Castanets

Through all the moving thoroughfares
And in the contending marts of trade;
Within the babbling magazines and
Even as I rode the surcharged vehicles
Which rolled at dizzy onwardness
Without the impulse of the harnessed steed;
During the waking hours, bewhiles
I battled with the reckless wind
And closed my eyes against the tossing clouds

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