_Janet of the Dunes_, 1908. _Joyce of the North Woods_, 1911. _A Son of the Hills_, 1913. _The Place Beyond the Winds_, 1914. _The Vindication_, 1917. _Mam’selle Jo: A Novel of the St. Lawrence Country_, 1918. _Unbroken Lines_, 1919. _The Shield of Silence_, 1921. _At the Crossroads_, 1922. _(Also many books for boys and girls.)_
_Mrs. Comstock’s earlier books are to be had in reprint. Janet of the Dunes was published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston; the others are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._
Nothing is so satisfactory to write about as a novelist with ideas; but in writing about Mrs. Honoré Willsie we shall not discuss her ideas. It will be enough to try faithfully to set them before her thousands of readers and the thousands who ought to be her readers, to try to picture Mrs. Willsie herself. That is all that can be done in a chapter of reasonable length. To discuss intelligently Mrs. Willsie’s ideas would require a book and an amount of exact knowledge on certain subjects--immigration and Americanization, for example--that is no part of our reporter’s equipment. A straightaway bit of exposition must do instead.
The spring of 1919 will see the publication of a new novel by Mrs. Willsie, _The Forbidden Trail_, an exciting story of the _Still Jim_ country, Arizona and the irrigable West. The novel deals with the clever efforts of German spies and sympathizers to appropriate for Germany the discoveries and improvements made by the sturdy Americans of our United States Reclamation Service. This theme is not so completely derived from the war as might appear at first glance. Readers of _Still Jim_ will recall in the closing chapters the visit of Herr Gluck to the Cabillo dam and his effort to get Jim Manning to enter the service of the German Government--in a legitimate way, however. Of the illegitimate ways in which Germany was then working among American engineers Mrs. Willsie is now free to speak and may be trusted to speak out of an exact knowledge. For her husband, Henry Elmer Willsie, of New York, was an inventor and consulting engineer when she was married to him and with him she spent two years in the deserts of Arizona.
Honoré Willsie was born in Ottumwa, Iowa, the daughter of William Dunbar McCue and Lilly Bryant (Head) McCue and a descendant of old New Englanders who went West, the people who form the important background of _Still Jim_ and _Lydia of the Pines_. She is a Bachelor of Arts of the University of Wisconsin and was married soon after her graduation. The two years in the West followed and then the husband and wife came to New York where Mrs. Willsie devoted herself to the task of winning recognition as a writer. She says now: