This is the front dust jacket of Gundell, Glenn (Ed.), Writing--from Idea to Printed Page: Case Histories of Stories and Articles Published in the Saturday Evening Post (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1949). The book focuses on six pieces that eventually were published in the magazine, exhibiting photocopies of all the available documents of what today we would call the writing process. For instance, Jack Alexander’s piece on “The Cities of America: St. Louis” (pp. 59-124) is represented by the printed piece, the author’s account of its writing, initial handwritten notes (take a look), typewritten notes with handwritten additions, background research with underlinings and notes, more notes both typed and handwritten, typed ideas for possible leads to the story with double-layered revisions, typed note cards from research, notes typed up from interviews, the first draft composed on the typewriter with heavy hand revisions, and the second draft with editors’ revisions and queries and checkmarks indicating that factual items had been verified (take a look).

 The book’s six “case histories” were prepared by the Saturday Evening Post for the University of Missouri Journalism School, with profit from sales going to professional journalism organizations. To my knowledge, no book since has documented as thoroughly what Frank Luther Mott, Dean of the Journalism School, in his foreward to the book, terms “the building and processing of an article from idea to publication” (p. v).

But wait a minute! “Processing of an article”! This book was published in 1949! Wasn’t the “writing process” invented by Gordon D. Rohman in 1965?

RH, August 2003