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SIGNATURES
Identified individuals are represented by a biographical sketch, a list of connections to other signatures, and, in most cases, an artifact from the Ransom Centers collections. Help us identify more signatures by submitting your suggested identification.
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THE DOOR
Location on door: front, panel 1
GORDON STILES
Gordon Stiles (d. 1930) was a journalist and a short story writer who led a life of adventure. He was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, and during World War I joined the British Army and was assigned to the Royal Air Corps. Screenwriter and novelist Ben Hecht remembered Stiles as a "dashing, demobilized flying ace" in his memoir A Child of the Century. Stiles was also reportedly one of the few American newspapermen in Germany during the 1918 Revolution in which the Hohenzollern dynasty was replaced with the Weimar Republic. Following the war, Stiles contributed short stories to magazines such as Argosy All-Story Weekly, Munsey's, and Young's Realistic Stories. Though there are few details, he appears at one point to have been married to novelist and fellow signer of the Greenwich Village Bookshop door, Jeanne Judson. Stiles died in a car accident near Warwick, New York in 1930.
Gordon Stiles's "Joseph Conrad" in the Greenwich Villager (9 July 1921)
Stiles published this anecdotal account of a visit with Joseph Conrad in the first issue of the Greenwich Villager (July 9, 1921). The encounter took place while Stiles was in England during the war. According to Stiles, Conrad (like many other writers of the period) saw World War I as a foolish and purposeless conflict.