68 AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS [68 



an actor's education does not need to be academic. The 

 dramatist is also quite as likely to be well equipped by close 

 relations with the stage as by working with books. The 

 figures indicate that for all other classes of men of letters, 

 however, higher education was a great aid in achieving suc- 

 cess. Even poets, who are reputed to be born and not made, 

 enjoyed at least a partial college course in more than half 

 of the cases recorded. 



Over fifty per cent of all the literati studied received a 

 full college education. No figures are available for the 

 number of college graduates in that part of the American 

 people which was born before 1851. Certainly they did not 

 number more than a few score thousand.^ Since this com- 

 paratively small number of people produced more literati 

 than the tens of millions of persons without a college de- 

 gree, it is apparent that the man or woman with an academic 

 education was several hundred times as likely to be a per- 

 son who would achieve literary distinction as was the person 

 without that training.^ 



Tables XVI and XVII show, by decades, the education 

 received by literary men and women. It appears that, in 

 spite of some fluctuation, the degree of education received 

 by literary men remained on the whole constant. By decades, 

 from fifty-three to sixty-nine per cent were college gradu- 

 ates. This relatively small fluctuation was accompanied 

 by no consistent tendency for the proportion to increase 

 or diminish. On the other hand, the degree of education 

 received by women increased remarkably. While very few 

 women born even as late as 1850 enjoyed a college educa- 

 tion, the proportion who graduated from high schools in- 



^ In 1850 there were less than twenty-eight thousand students en- 

 rolled in the colleges of the United States. Compendium of the Sev- 

 enth Census, table cxlv. 



»C/. Cattell, Davies, Odin, op. cit. 



