American author Willa Cather published her novel, My Antonia, in 1918. It’s a story about the life of a Bohemian immigrant girl who lives on the prairie in a town called Black Hawk, Nebraska.

His Family by Ernest Poole won the first Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1918.

Booth Tarkington continued to be a popular and prolific author, publishing his novel of the midwest, The Magnificent Ambersons in 1918. I wrote about The Magnificent Ambersons here. Orson Welles made a movie based on Tarkington’s book that I plan to watch someday.

And last but not least, professor William Strunk, Jr. wrote a little book called The Elements of Style, and he published it himself privately for use in his teaching at Cornell University. It was a writing style guide with eight rules of usage and ten principles of composition, and it greatly influenced a young student and writer named E.B. White (author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little); so much so, that White later found the little book, wrote a newspaper story about it, and revised it for publication by Macmillan Publishers in 1959. (Professor Strunk was, by this time, deceased.)

The little book, known informally as Strunk and White, became a best seller, and its influence on the writing habits and style of academic writers and common journalists has been incalculable. You can listen to an NPR story on the history of Strunk and White: