In late 1931, the budding literary journal Prairie Schooner informed its readers that “Miss Eunice Chapin, formerly of Lincoln” (and formerly of the University of Nebraska, where Prairie Schooner was based) had published her first novel, Pick Up. “It is trash, and not worth the hour it takes to read it.” It was, according to the reviewer, “the worst first-novel we have ever read,” the sort of thing only of interest to “servant girls and overworked stenographers.” Having done a fair amount of research into the history and society of Lincoln, Nebraska around this time for my biography of Virginia Faulkner (due from the University of Nebraska Press in January 2026), the bitterness of this review intrigued me. Was there more than just literary criticism at work here?
Lincoln and its major university should have been proud of its native daughter. Having done graduate work at Bryn Mawr, Eunice Chapin rose steadily through the literary world of New York City, first as a freelancer, then as an assistant editor at Forum, then managing editor of McCall’s, one of the most popular women’s magazines in America, in 1928, and finally acquisition editor with G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1930. She wrote Pick Up after George Putnam himself challenged her to put her apparently encyclopedic knowledge of the city, or at least Manhattan, on paper.
Chapin’s father was a banker, director of First National, one of the largest banks in the city and on the boards of several companies and charities in Lincoln, so there was an understandable tendency among the local newspapers to make a big deal of Pick Up. The Star gave the book a half-page spread in its Sunday magazine section, announcing that it “Reveals Real Quality in Modern Youth.” Chapin herself tried to downplay the hype, saying that “her conservative friends are going to be surprised” and that her family “will wish I’d produced a Hamlet” instead of something “frisky.”
“Frisky” was putting it mildly for most Lincoln readers. In the book’s opening chapter, Cherry Towne, a secretary, meets a handsome young man on an uptown bus. Losing her hat in a gust of wind, she catches a chill and he generously invites her up to his luxurious apartment to warm up, introducing himself as Niels Atherton. After chit-chat about his stint with a circus in Barcelona, a tiger hunt in Malaya, and an expedition up the Amazon, he drops that he happens to own the Humming Bird motor company in Detroit.
Though Cherry demurs that she has little experience with alcohol, he plies her with multiple cocktails and then suggests she take a bath to relax. Unable to steer a straight course into the bathroom, she allows him to disrobe and set her into the tub, where he proceeds to soap her all over. This is as intimate as the evening gets, but allowing a strange man she’s known for just a few hours to assist with her ablutions was already a prairie mile past the point where any good Midwest girl should have drawn the line.
Not content with publicizing the book, the Star decided to publish Pick Up as a serial. Unfortunately, so many complaints were received when the first two installments were published that the paper put its censors to work and excised all the potentially scandalous bits from the remaining text. The Omaha World-Herald called the resulting work “pretty much emaciated,” with “little reason for publishing it.” Several other papers around the country ran the book as a serial as well, but Pick Up failed to gain traction either critically or commercially. (Perhaps this is why George Putnam, who encouraged Chapin to write the book, passed on publishing it — and even Brewer & Warren, who accepted it, chose not to take Chapin’s second novel, City Girl, a year later.)
If there was an agenda behind the Prairie Schooner review, the journal wasn’t alone in its judgment. The New York Time dismissed the book as “a flimsy bit of fluff.” Saturday Review called it a “slightly idiotic, pseudo-sophisticated tale,” and “a novel peopled exclusively by imbeciles, morons, pinheads, and worse….” The Brooklyn Daily Times compared Chapin’s subject and style to that of Viña Delmar’s best-seller Bad Girl: “reportorial, with great attention to detail.” Its rival, the Brooklyn Eagle, on the other hand, thought Chapin capable of much better work: “talent devoted to such a girl as Cherry is too much like squirrel hunting with a bear trap.”
Most reviewers found it implausible that Cherry would manage to cross paths with so many celebrities. Strolling into the restaurant of the Algonquin Hotel, Ricky, another of her suitors, remarks, “There’s Fannie Hurst — back from Florence. And [Lucius] Beebe, home from Bermuda. And Admiral [Richard] Byrd…” Among the glitterati he spots is Niels, lunching with June, a Broadway star known as one of his main squeezes. There’s plenty of jealousy, mixed motives, and white lies to propel Chapin’s story along for its three hundred-some pages, but what there isn’t is substance, either behind its characters’ masks or underneath Chapin’s descriptions of New York. Chapin told one Lincoln reporter that she hoped “those at home who know me will see that fragile, sensitive story of the girl beneath the noisy, wisecracking surface of New York, and they’ll understand, and like it.” I hoped so, too. But I’m afraid the reviewers were right.
RKO bought the film rights to Pick Up and announced its version would star Helen Twelvetrees, but the project died in development, as did “Coast to Coast,” an original story Chapin sold to Fox. Still, the studios were gathering in writers like firewood ahead of a rough winter and Chapin ended 1931 on the staff at Columbia. Within a year of that, she married John Larkin, a playwright and former New York acquaintance. She published three more novels — City Girl (1932), Love Without Breakfast (1934), and Million-Dollar Story (1938) — all of which quickly disappeared without much critical notice. If she contributed to any films, her credits have been lost, likely all in early stages of development. Eunice Chapin died in Los Angeles in 1978.