Queer Places:
Northwestern University, 633 Clark St, Evanston, IL 60208, United States
Hamilton College, 198 College Hill Rd, Clinton, NY 13323, United States
Union College, 807 Union St, Schenectady, NY 12308, United States
Graceland Cemetery, 4001 N Clark St, Chicago, IL 60613, United States

Henry Kitchell Webster (September 7, 1875 – December 8, 1932) was an influential American author and a prominent figure in the early twentieth-century Midwestern literary landscape.

Born on September 7, 1875, in Evanston, Illinois, he was the eldest child of Evanston iron manufacturer Towner Keeney Webster and Emma Josephine Kitchell Webster. Raised in a well-to-do family alongside five siblings, he attended Evanston High School, spent a year at Northwestern University, and subsequently completed his degree at Hamilton College in 1897. After a brief tenure teaching English and rhetoric at Union College in New York, he returned to Evanston to pursue a full-time career in literature.

Webster made his literary mark by co-authoring the business novel The Short Line War in 1899 with his boyhood friend Samuel Merwin. The duo followed this up with Calumet "K" in 1901, a highly popular work that later gained enduring notoriety as Ayn Rand's favorite novel and a foundational influence on her Objectivist philosophy. Over the course of his prolific career, Webster published twenty-nine novels, a play titled June Madness, and hundreds of short stories. He purposefully operated a self-described single-man fiction factory, balancing ambitious mainstream novels with high-volume, highly lucrative magazine serials published under pen names like O. C. Cabot. His serious works, including The Real Adventure, An American Family, and Mary Wollaston, achieved widespread critical acclaim, translated into multiple languages, and adapted into silent films.

Beyond his solitary writing desk, Webster was deeply embedded in the cultural social life of Chicago. He was a charter member and past president of the Cliff Dwellers, a member of the Tavern Club, and a frequent fixture in the city's artistic inner circles. Most notably, Webster was a core member of the Little Room, a famous mixed-gender social club that convened on Friday afternoons and evenings in the top-floor skylit studios of the Fine Arts Building in Chicago. Fostered by figures like Hamlin Garland and Henry Blake Fuller, the Little Room served as a key meeting point for Chicago's bohemian elite.

Webster's participation in the Little Room connected him directly to a vibrant network of progressive and queer artists, writers, and reformers. The club hosted many prominent gay and lesbian figures of the era, including the famed illustrator J.C. Leyendecker and his brother Frank Xavier Leyendecker, as well as influential social reformer Jane Addams, and poet Harriet Monroe. Within this dynamic artistic ecosystem, Webster associated with fellow luminaries such as George Ade, Alice Gerstenberg, Lorado Taft, Edith Wyatt, and John T. McCutcheon.

In his personal life, Webster married Mary Ward Orth on September 7, 1901, and the couple had three sons: Henry Kitchell Jr., Stokely, and Roderick. The family traveled extensively, spending a year living in Paris on the Rive Gauche in 1922, where Stokely studied under family friend Lawton S. Parker. Webster remained deeply connected to his family, often spending weekends driving to his mother's farm near Oregon, Illinois. In 1930, he wrote a memoir dedicated to his father, and in 1922, he received a double inheritance share in his father's will to offset the financial risks of his writing profession.

In the summer of 1932, Webster was diagnosed with cancer. He passed away at his home in Evanston on December 8, 1932, at the age of 57, leaving behind a partially finished manuscript, The Alleged Great-Aunt, which was later completed by his friends Janet Ayer Fairbank and Margaret Ayer Barnes. Webster was buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, remembered as a vital pioneer of the modern American bestseller.

References:

We’ve Been Here All Along: Wisconsin’s Early Gay History Hardcover – Illustrated, May 7, 2019 by R. Richard Wagner

Other References:

• Archival Collections: Henry Kitchell Webster Papers housed at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
• The Chicago Daily Tribune: "Literary Circle Mourns Webster" by Fanny Butcher (December 10, 1932).
• The Chicago Daily Tribune: "Henry K. Webster's Novel of Chicago and Chicagoans" by Shepherd Butler (October 19, 1918).
• The New York Times: "Henry K. Webster, Noted Writer, Dead" (December 10, 1932).
• The New York Times: "Marriage as 'The Real Adventure'" (January 23, 1916).
• Brooklyn Daily Eagle: "Henry K. Webster, Novelist, Long Ill, Dies in Evanston" (December 9, 1932).
• New York Tribune: "Writer's Risks Win Wealth - Henry Kitchell Webster Gets Double Share in Will" (October 20, 1922).
• The Saturday Evening Post: "Making a Living by Literature" by O. C. Cabot / Anonymous (November 11, 1911).
• Webster, Henry Kitchell. A Memoir of Towner Keeney Webster: 1849–1922. Chicago: Walter A. Strong, 1930.
• Webster, Stokely. Stokely Webster and his Paris. Newington, CT: Connecticut River Press, 2001.
• Webster, Henry K., Janet A. Fairbank, and Margaret A. Barnes. The Alleged Great-Aunt. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1935.
• Rand, Ayn. Introduction to Calumet "K", by Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster. New York: NBI Press, 1967.
• Lehman, Peter. "Change in Urban America: The Early 20th Century through the Works of Henry Kitchell Webster." Master's thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 2012.
• Dalrymple, Scott. "Capital Fictions: The Business Novel in America, 1890–1910." PhD diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1997.

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