ABSTRACT
Frank Gelett Burgess, American humorist, novelist and short-story writer, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 30, 1866. He was the son of Thomas H. Burgess and Caroline Brooks Burgess. Burgess studied civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinking that would give him a chance to do sketching. In 1891 Burgess returned to San Francisco, decided to cross the Bay to Berkeley and was employed as an instructor in topographical drawing at the University of California in Berkeley. The graduating class at the university elected him an honorary member after the escapade became known but, according to Burgess in the interview with S. J. Woolf, "the faculty decided he had better look elsewhere for a job". Burgess was associated with Bruce Porter in The Lark, and the publication lasted for two years, from 1895 to 1897. Woolf reported that Burgess once stopped the presses of a magazine to change one single word.
