WHITE, WILLIAM ALLEN ), American journalist, born at Emporia, Kansas, Feb. 1o, 1868. He attended the University of Kansas but left to edit the El Dorado Repub lican. In 1891 he went to Kansas City and became an editorial writer on the Star and in 1895 purchased the Emporia Daily and iVeekly Gazette. An editorial written in 1896 entitled "What's the Matter with Kansas?", an impassioned plea against populism, made him and his paper nationally known. He refused to run for political office. Three books of short stories, The Real Issue (1896), The Court of Boyville (1899), Strategems and Spoils 0900, and a volume of sketches, In Our Town (1906), gave him wide reputation as an interpreter of life in the country towns of the Middle-West. In 1909 he published his first novel, A Certain Rich Man, which passed through many editions. Then
followed The Old Order Changeth (Iwo), political essays; God's Puppets (1916), short stories, and In the Heart of a Fool (1918), another successful novel. Turning to interpretative biography, he wrote a Life of Woodrow Wilson (1924), Calvin Coolidge, the Man Who is President (1925), and Masks in a Pageant (1928). Many of his best editorials are collected in The Editor and His People (1924). He was sent to France by the American Red Cross as an observer in 1917, was a delegate to the Russian Con ference at Prinkipb, 1919, and is a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Foundation and Walter Hines Page Foundation.