1876–1958 · American mystery novelist & Saturday Evening Post regular
Mary Roberts Rinehart was one of the best-selling American writers of the early twentieth century — a mystery novelist whose breakthrough, The Circular Staircase (1908), helped invent the “had I but known” suspense style, and a prolific contributor to The Saturday Evening Post whose books had sold well over ten million copies by her death. Her January 1928 Post essay on the perils of celebrity contains the earliest printing of this joke that quote researchers have located, told about an unnamed financier and an unnamed hostess. That makes her the first documented teller, not necessarily the inventor: the comic situation — a child who might remark on a guest’s nose — was already in print decades earlier, in the 1901 recitation book The New Century Speaker, though there the child speaks and there is no coached silence and no adult’s slip.