The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

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THE STORY OF MY LIFE.

was amoitious of a literary life, but I desired to acquire the
power of expression, so as to be able to write readily, correctly, and intelligently, and this requires practice. I soon
found myself with an abundance of literary occupation on
hand: stories for the impecunious and short-lived magazines
that started out under various auspices; hymns and poems
for all sorts of occasions; and essays, sketches, and verses
for the local papers. Notwithstanding there were few
writers in those days, literary work, even when it was of the
best, received most beggarly compensation, and it was not
expected that one could live by literature, even when one
was a prolific and popular bookmaker. " That can be done
in England," it was said, " where government aids literary
people with pensions, but it never can be done in America,
for who would read an American book? "
One of the great state temperance organizations of Massachusetts offered a prize of fifty dollars for the best story,
based on fact, illustrative of the Washingtonian temperance
reform. Three eminent gentlemen of Boston were elected a
committee to examine the manuscripts, and award the prize,
-Walter Channing, M.D., Professor Elizur Wright, Jr., and
Charles Marsh, M.D. I competed for the prize, and won it.
My story was entitled, "Thirty Years too Late," and was
considered the best among two hundred and fifty manuscripts received by the committee. It had a large circulation when published as a booklet, and was republished
in England, where it ran through several editions.
It had been out of print for a quarter of a century, when,
in 1876, it was reproduced in Boston by Lockwood, Brooks
& Company, at the desire of many temperance workers,
who perceived a similarity between the Washingtonian
movement of the last generation and the reform movement
of that day The simplicity of the story, which illustrated