When the Yule Log Burns

Leona Dalrymple was an early twentieth-century American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Leona Dalrymple was born on February 11, 1884, in Passaic, New Jersey, the oldest child of New Jersey Assemblyman and former judge George H. Dalrymple and Carrie V. (Dean) Dalrymple. She grew up in Passaic and graduated from the high school in 1902. On February 7, 1921, she married her lifelong friend Clarence Acton Wilson in a Greenwich Village studio apartment ceremony. Dalrymple's first publication was a play in 1905, and the company that published it eventually published another dozen of her works, largely for amateur theatricals. Dalrymple earned the then-very high prize of US$10,000 in a literary competition hosted by the publisher Reilly & Britton and judged by Ida Tarbell and S.S. McClure. Her romantic novel Diane of the Green Van, which was released the following year, won first place. Dalrymple's second contribution in the competition, The Nomad, was likewise well acclaimed by the judges, although it appears to have never been published, or at least not under that title.