"Couldn't he write about common people--about cops and bums and sailors and crooks and places where reg'lar people lived?"

The publication history of this painting provides an excellent example of how publishers used and reused artists’ work. The image was first published in a horizontal format, almost twice as wide as the present size, in Collier's Weekly Magazine. Scribner’s acquired the painting for $25.00 and then an artist—perhaps N. C. Wyeth, perhaps an artist in the Scribner’s art department—adapted the painting to a vertical format suitable for the frontispiece of a book page. The canvas was cut at both sides, height was added to the top of the picture with an extra piece of canvas, and the design of the interior space was reworked. The adapted image was published as the frontispiece in Hiker Joy, a collection of short stories by James B. Connolly (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920).