Guy Wetmore Carryl

Henry Davis Sleeper and writer Guy Wetmore Carryl met not long after Carryl’s 1901 return from Paris, where he had served as a correspondent for a number of popular American magazines. Several years older than Sleeper he was urbane, handsome, bookish, and passionate about his home—in other words, he embodied all the qualities Sleeper would later recognize in Piatt Andrew. A writer of wide-ranging talents, Carryl was a playwright, journalist, poet, and satirist; today he is best known for such mildly risqué verse as Mother Goose for Grownups (1900) and Grimm Tales Made Gay (1902). Sleeper described him as a man “of poetic instincts … a genial and most communicative companion.” 

The physical extent of the men’s relationship may never be known, but Sleeper’s emotional attachment to Carryl is clear. He kept framed photos of the writer, collected several volumes of press clippings about his work, and was a frequent guest at Carryl’s Swampscott home. It is tempting to see in their relationship a foreshadowing of Sleeper’s later crush on the romantically unavailable Andrew—and yet Carryl’s enigmatic dedication to Sleeper in his posthumously-published novel, Far From the Maddening Girls (1904), suggests at least some form of romantic reciprocation.