In Scotland it has been generally assumed that Eleanor Atkinson learned of Greyfriars Bobby and wrote the story without ever visiting the city of Edinburgh, where the wee doggie lived and was given the freedom of the city.  This biographical extract  published in Twentieth Century Authors before her death in 1942 proves that Eleanor did in fact visit Edinburgh. 

ATKINSON Mrs. ELEANOR (STACKHOUSE) (1863 - ) American novelist, writes:” My first bit of luck was to be born in Rensselaer, in north western Indiana.  It had been settled late, and largely by people of old American stock from the Eastern seaboard and southern Ohio.  So it had from pioneer days many people of superior education and public spirit.  My father of Philadelphia Quaker parentage, and my mother of Colonial ancestry in Connecticut, were typical.  One of the memories of a happy childhood in Renssalaer was the early discovery of books.  Before I could read, my mother read to me her favorite poets: Scott, Burns, and Tennyson.  Soon I was exploring our own and other people’s bookshelves, and finding whatever was there for me.  And I was scribbling industriously on any topic that kindled the imagination.  With that good start I should have gone faster and farther; and might reasonably have been expected to find literary material in my own experience.  Instead, I went as far afield as Edinburgh, French Flanders, the Island of Martinique, and the Ohio wilderness of a century before.  I think I had nothing to say about that.  It appears to me that a creative writer’s choice of subject must be governed by his metal limitations and emotional responses.  I know what mine are.

“I had been graduated from the IndianapolisNormalTraining School before breaking into print; and it took a lot of experimental writing, during four years of teaching, there and in Chicago, and then fortunate circumstances for me to get into newspaper work.  My career as a special writer on the Chicago Tribune, over the pen name of ‘Nora Marks,’ came to an end with my marriage in 1891 to Francis Blake Atkinson, a news editor with ideas, initiative, and energy.  Our talents being in the same field and complementary, we presently launched a publishing venture: The Little Chronicle, a current events’ weekly for grammar and high school grades.  Unable to find suitable serials, I wrote two myself, and was surprised when both of them were brought out in book form. Thus I became an author by accident, not intention. Most of my books happened more or less in this way, as the by-product of much anonymous literary work.

“As many women have proved, professional writing can be successfully combined with home making.  When our paper was sold we went on the staff of the F.E. Compton Co., publishers of students’ encyclopaedias, my husband as managing editor.  As an associate editor, researcher, and write, I worked on contract, doing my writing at home and in my own time.  Books and some articles were written in the intervals between contracts.  Both my daughters caught the matrimonial bug and scribbler’s itch early.  As ‘Dorothy Blake’ and ‘Eleanor Blake’ they are both professional writers and home makers.

“Only two of my books can be said to have been premeditated and long prepared for: Greyfriars Bobby and Johnny Appleseed.  They are that have had the widest appeal and have survived the longest.  So there is an argument for the greater offense for anyone who thinks of committing the crime of writing a book.”

Mrs. Atkinson today makes her home in Manhasset, Long Island, a suburb of New York City.  She has published no new books for more than a two decades, but in her late seventies she is the same intelligent, kindly, and humanitarian woman whose sincere and unpretentious stories have given wholesome enjoyment to readers of ages for more than two generations.  Perhaps Greyfriars Bobby, a true classic wherever dog stories are read  and loved, will live longest of her books; it has already been continuously in print for more than a quarter of a century.  It is an interesting circumstance that though nearly all of Mrs. Atkinson’s books were originally written for (and read by) adults, their greatest and continuing popularity has been with younger readers. “I think it was fortunate,” she says, “that I did not know that young people were going to care for my stories. I might have made the mistake of writing down to them.  An author never knows his luck!”

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