from playwriting was The Old Town, produced in 1910. After Ade retired from writing Broadway plays in 1910, he continued to write one-act plays that small theater companies presented in theatres across the United States. Marse Covington is considered to be among the best of his one-act plays. Ade also wrote scripts for moving pictures, such as Our Leading Citizen (1922 silent film), Back Home and Broke (1922 silent film), and Woman-Proof (1923 silent film) for actor Thomas Meighan. Ade also wrote two films for Will Rogers, U.S. Minister Bedlow and The County Chairman, a 1935-screen version of the play, but Ade did not get along with Hollywood filmmakers. By the mid-1920s, Ade's plays were no longer in fashion, but he continued to write essays, short stories, and articles for newspapers and magazines in addition to film scripts. Ade also wrote about his extensive travels, but he is best known for his humorous columns, essays, books, and plays. His fables in slang stories and series of books, in addition to making him wealthy, gained him notoriety as an American writer. His final book, The Old-Time Saloon, was published in 1931. Writing style Ade's literary reputation rests upon his achievements as a humorist of American character. When the United States began a population shift as the first large wave of migration from rural communities to urban cities and the county transitioned from an agrarian to an industrial economy, Ade used his wit and keen observational skills to record in his writings the efforts of ordinary people to get along and to cope with these changes. Because Ade grew up in a Midwestern farming community and also knew about urban living in cities like Chicago, he could develop stories and dialog that realistically captured daily life in either of these settings. His fictional men and women typically represented the common, undistinguished, average Americans, who were often "suspicious of poets, saints, reformers, eccentricity, snobbishness, and affectation," as well as newcomers. While his humor depicts Midwestern speech and manners, it also reflects mannerisms found in late 19th-century America as well. Like Ade himself, his characters also found humor in everyday experiences, mocked pretentious social situations, and tried not take life too seriously. Using a writing style similar to Mark Twain's, Ade was adept in the use of the American language. Ade's fables in slang," for example, were written in the American colloquial vernacular. He