Time & Perspective Quote by George Barr McCutcheon

There is a sly shrug in McCutcheon’s phrasing: “In course of time” turns the monumental act of producing a first novel into something that merely… happens. He sidesteps the usual authorial mythology (anguish, vocation, genius) and replaces it with a calm, almost clerical sense of inevitability. That understatement reads like self-protection and salesmanship at once: the line keeps ego at bay while quietly asserting that publication is the natural endpoint of a life lived long enough with words.

Then comes the clean reveal: “It was a love story.” Not “a romance,” not “a tragedy,” not “a work of social critique.” Just the most market-tested genre label in the book business, delivered with plainness that feels both candid and strategic. For an early 20th-century American novelist writing into mass circulation, the love story wasn’t merely a theme; it was an entry pass into a crowded marketplace where emotion could be packaged, serialized, and reliably understood by strangers. McCutcheon’s own success with popular fiction makes the line land as knowing rather than naïve.

The subtext is about artistic origin stories and their convenient simplifications. A “first novel” is never only one thing, yet in retrospect it gets reduced to a single tag that makes the career legible: love story as origin myth, as the socially acceptable confession of ambition. Love becomes the alibi for wanting to be read. The wit is in how little he insists on. He lets the industry, and the audience, fill in the rest.