Winston Churchill’s novel The Inside of the Cup was published in 1913. It sparked a national debate about Christianity’s role in modern life. The incidents in the book, with few exceptions, take place in one of the largest cities in the United States of America, and of that portion known as the Middle West, a city once conservative and provincial, and rather proud of these qualities; but now outgrown them, and linked by lightning limited trains to other teeming centres of the modern world: a city recently overtaken by the plague which has swept our country from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Churchill was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended Smith Academy in Missouri and the United States Naval Academy, where he graduated in 1894. He joined the Army and Navy Journal as an editor after graduating. In order to pursue a writing career, he left the American Navy. He was appointed managing editor of the Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1895, but he left that position in less than a year to devote more time to writing. He was a published poet and essayist in addition to being a famous author. Some of his famous works include The Celebrity (1898), Richard Carvel (1899) The Crisis (1901), Coniston (1906), Mr. Crewe’s Career (1908), A Modern Chronicle (1910), The Inside of the Cup (1913), A Far Country (1915) and The Dwelling-Place of Light (1917).