American Ellis Parker Butler (1869 – 1937) was a full-time banker and part-time author, but that didn’t stop him from producing over 30 books and 2,000 short stories. He was a humorist and is best known for Pigs is Pigs and his stories about Philo Gubb , including Waffles and Mustard.
Butler grew up in Muscatine, Iowa and dropped out of Muscatine High School at the end of his freshman year in 1887. He was 17 years old at the time, and spent the next 11 years working odd jobs in Muscatine while working on his writing. Butler left some parting advice to aspiring authors in his obituary which was published in The Des Moines Register on Sept. 14, 1937: “Write the way you want to. Never sacrifice quality for quantity; go to school if you want to, but if you are going to write, you will regardless of schooling.”