Homer Croy

Homer Croy (March 11, 1883 – May 24, 1965) was an American author, occasional screenwriter, and Broadway performer born on a farm northwest of Maryville, Missouri. He enrolled at the University of Missouri in 1903 and remained there until 1907, editing the university yearbook and contributing to the Kansas City Star during his studies. He left without a degree after failing an English course in his senior year. Following his departure from college, Croy joined the staff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch before moving to New York City, where he worked for the writer Theodore Dreiser.

Croy's first book, When to Lock the Stable, appeared in 1914, the same year he began directing a series of short travelogue films, a project that continued into 1915. During World War I he served as production manager in Paris for the Community Motion Picture Bureau, an organization that distributed films to Allied troops. His first commercially successful novel, West of the Water Tower, was published in 1923 and depicted hypocrisy in a small Missouri town he called Junction City, a fictionalized rendering of his hometown of Maryville. A sequel, R.F.D. #3, followed in 1924.

His most widely read novel was They Had to See Paris, published in 1926, which follows a rural Missouri couple traveling through Europe. The book was adapted for the screen in 1929 as the first sound film to star Will Rogers. Many of Croy's other novels and stories were similarly adapted for film, and he received screenwriting credits on several feature productions during the 1930s, including Down to Earth (1932), The Cohens and Kellys in Trouble (1933), and The Harvester (1936). His 1932 novel Headed for Hollywood also engaged directly with the film industry as its subject, and his 1918 nonfiction work How Motion Pictures Are Made addressed the medium in an earlier era.

In 1927, Croy appeared on Broadway in History as Was, marking his single recorded stage credit. Beyond fiction and screenwriting, he produced biographies of notable figures, including books on outlaw Jesse James, humorist Will Rogers, and film director D.W. Griffith. His novel The Lady from Colorado served as the source material for an opera of the same name composed by Robert Ward, and Croy attended its world premiere at the Central City Opera in 1964. He was a close friend of Dale Carnegie, who dedicated his 1936 book How to Win Friends and Influence People to him.

Croy was married to Mae Belle Savell Croy, who was originally from Bagdad, Florida. The couple had one daughter, Carol, born in 1922. He died in New York City on May 24, 1965, at the age of 82.