Mary Roberts Rinehart, known for her best-selling mystery novels such as The Circular Staircase published in 1907, earned a reputation as “the American Agatha Christie” through the success of her novels. Yet Rinehart was also a WWI correspondent. After convincing her editor at The Saturday Evening Post to send her to the Belgian front, and armed with letters of introduction, her status as a well-known writer and member of the American Red Cross, as well as plenty of fearless initiative, she became the first American to report from the front. In Kings, Queens and Pawns (1915) Rinehart records scenes of life at, and far from, the front: a baby whose legs were blown off, a young soldier rendered blind in battle sitting quietly as he listens to a recording of Madama Butterfly, the entire non-combatant population of a Belgian town homeless after relentless German-lead bombings, a queen overseeing her Needlework Guild. Anticipating the ultimately widely held view of the bloody and often futile conflict, Rinehart argues that the greatest treasures of the warring countries, the young soldiers fighting so valiantly in the prime of their lives, are mere pawns wasted and lost on the desolate battlefields.

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Despite attempts to suppress its publication and the advertising ban placed on it, ‘The President’s Daughter’ enjoyed bestseller rankings after its eventual publication in 1927. Written so that Britton could raise enough funds to support her (and Harding’s) daughter and thus argue for the true legitimacy of children born out of wedlock, this tell-all about the affair between a starry-eyed girl and the man who would eventually become the twenty-ninth president of the United States is still a fascinating and relevant story in the context of the Me Too era.

In Britton’s eyes, Harding’s a powerful, hometown hero she’s worshipped for years. In his eyes, she’s a darling waif he yearns to possess. Is she seduced by his power, his physicality, his being more than thirty years her senior? Is he drawn to her naïveté, her youth, her wide-eyed and deep trust? Britton lays it all bare in ‘The President’s Daughter’.

Originally published in 1927.

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