George Ade

George Ade (February 9, 1866 – May 16, 1944) was an American writer, syndicated newspaper columnist, librettist, and playwright born in Kentland, Indiana, in Newton County. The second youngest of seven children, Ade was the son of John Ade, a farmer, bank cashier, and Newton County recorder, and Adaline Wardell (Bush) Ade, a homemaker. From an early age Ade was drawn to reading rather than manual labor, and after graduating from Kentland High School in 1881 he spent an additional year there before enrolling at Purdue University in 1883 on scholarship. At Purdue he studied science, joined the Sigma Chi fraternity, developed an interest in theater, and formed a lifelong friendship with cartoonist John T. McCutcheon. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1887.

After briefly considering a legal career, Ade entered journalism, working as a reporter and telegraph editor for the Lafayette Morning News and then the Lafayette Call. By 1890 he had relocated to Chicago, where he joined McCutcheon at the Chicago Daily News, later known as the Chicago Morning News and then the Chicago Record. His early assignments included a daily weather column, coverage of the 1892 heavyweight championship bout between John L. Sullivan and James J. Corbett in New Orleans, and reporting on the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Beginning in 1893, Ade took charge of the daily column "Stories of the Streets and of the Town," which used street language and slang to portray daily life in Chicago and introduced recurring characters including Artie, an office boy; Pink Marsh, an African American shoeshine boy; and Doc Horne, described as a gentlemanly liar. Collections of these columns were subsequently published as the books Artie (1896), Pink Marsh (1897), and Doc Horne (1899).

In 1897 Ade introduced his fables in slang in the Chicago Record, beginning with "The Fable of Sister Mae, Who Did As Well As Could Be Expected," published on September 17 of that year. These humorous stories, structured around moral conclusions, employed vernacular speech and an idiosyncratic use of capitalization in characters' dialogue. Ade left the Chicago Record in 1899 to devote himself to a nationally syndicated fables column. The first book compilation, Fables in Slang, appeared in 1900 and proved popular with the public; additional collections followed for nearly two decades, concluding with Hand-Made Fables in 1920. The fables also appeared in periodicals, were adapted into motion-picture shorts by the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, and were turned into comic strips by Art Helfant. The success of the fables earned Ade the nickname the "Aesop of Indiana" and established him as a nationally recognized American humorist. Another notable early book, In Babel, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1903.

Once his newspaper columns entered syndication in 1900, Ade turned his attention to the stage. His first Broadway production was the musical The Night of the Fourth, which premiered on January 21, 1901, at the Victoria Theatre, with Ade writing the book alongside composer Max Hoffmann and lyricist J. Sherrie Mathews; it closed after fourteen performances. His next Broadway work, the operetta The Sultan of Sulu, with music by Alfred G. Wathall, fared considerably better. Premiering at Wallack's Theatre on December 29, 1902, in a production by impresario Henry W. Savage, the operetta centered on American military efforts to assimilate natives of the Philippines into American culture and ran for 200 performances before closing on June 13, 1903. It subsequently toured nationally and returned to Broadway in November 1903 at the Grand Opera House. Nathaniel D. Mann contributed one song to the production, "My Sulu Lulu Loo."

Ade's Broadway output expanded rapidly in the years that followed. The County Chairman, a work about small-town politics, and the musical comedy Peggy from Paris both appeared in 1903. In 1904, The Sho-Gun, a musical set in Korea, and The College Widow, a comedy centered on college life and American collegiate football, were simultaneously running on Broadway. Additional Broadway credits include the musical A Knight for a Day, the play Artie, Father and the Boys, and the musical The Fair Co-ed. Not every production was a success — The Bad Samaritan (1905) was among those that did not find an audience — but several of his plays and fables were adapted into motion pictures, extending his reach beyond the stage.

Beyond his writing career, Ade was a Purdue University trustee from 1909 to 1916, a longtime member of the Purdue Alumni Association, a supporter of Sigma Chi, and a former president of the Mark Twain Association of America. He donated funds toward the construction of Purdue's Memorial Gymnasium and its Memorial Union Building, and together with David Edward Ross contributed land and funding for the construction of Ross–Ade Stadium, named in their honor in 1924. Ade maintained an estate called Hazelden near Brook, Indiana, where he enjoyed entertaining, as well as traveling and golf. Along with Booth Tarkington, Meredith Nicholson, and James Whitcomb Riley, he is recognized as a contributor to what has been described as a Golden Age of literature in Indiana during the first quarter of the twentieth century.