Not yet forty-three when he died in 1919, Charles E. Van Loan had become, in only ten years, what an obituary in the Philadelphia Public Ledger called the figure "who, in the opinion of the critics, had the largest following of men readers of any magazine fiction writer." Moving his focus back and forth among the baseball diamond, the boxing ring, the racetrack, and the golf course, Van Loan wrote scores of short stories for national magazines, starting in 1909. During his last seven years most of his stories, not all of which were about sports, appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, where Van Loan was appointed associate editor a few months before his death. Many of his sports stories were collected in eight books between 1911 and 1919; a ninth book (1915) comprises stories about the booming Hollywood film industry.

Charles Emmett Van Loan was born in the then small town of...