Why It Is Printed
MORE than a million people have sat in audiences in all parts of the
United States and have listened to "The University of Hard Knocks." It has
been delivered to date more than twenty-five hundred times upon lyceum
courses, at chautauquas, teachers\' institutes, club gatherings, conventions
and before various other kinds of audiences. Ralph Parlette is kept busy
year after year lecturing, because his lectures deal with universal human
experience.
"Can I get the lecture in book form?" That continuous question from
audiences brought out this book in response. Here is the overflow of many
deliveries.
"What is written here is not the way I would write it, were I writing a
book," says Ralph Parlette. "It is the way I say it. The lecture took this
unconscious colloquial form before audiences. An audience makes a
lecture, if the lecture survives. I wish I could shake the hand of every
person who has sat in my audiences. And I wish I could tell the lecture
committees of America how I appreciate the vast amount of altruistic work
they have done in bringing the audiences of America together. For lecture
audiences are not drawn together, they are pushed together."