Guide to the Archive: Alexander Botts

Alexander Botts made his first appearance in The Saturday Evening Post on April 16, 1927, in “I’m a Natural-Born Salesman.” Optimistic and over-confident, this traveling salesman for the Earthworm Tractor Company routinely puts himself in situations that should lead to disaster, or at least to being fired, but through some combination of faith, determination, and pure dumb luck, he always makes the sale.

Botts is the creation of William Hazlett Upson. After World War I, Upson worked with the Holt Caterpillar company as a service mechanic and troubleshooter. “My main job,” he has said, “was to travel around the country trying to make the tractors do what the salesman had said they would. In this way I learned more about salesmen than they know about themselves.”

Those experiences would serve as the backbone for his Alexander Botts stories, which most often take the form of letters between Botts and his boss Gilbert Henderson, his often-beleaguered sales manager. One big difference between Upson’s real-life experiences and his short stories is that when Botts over-promises in his sales pitch, he always finds some way to deliver on those promises, even when it involves ignoring his boss’s orders.

Alexander Botts is prone to accidents and sometimes deluded about his abilities as a salesman, but his ingenuity and resolve always seem to overcome his faults, and readers have loved him for it. Readers also enjoyed that Botts confronted the same real-world troubles as they did: When Americans were struggling through the Great Depression, so was Botts and his company. When the U.S. entered World War II — and manufacturing across the country shifted to war production — Alexander and the Earthworm Tractor Company were doing the same, adapting to the vagaries of military bureaucracy. When the war ended in real life, it ended in the stories, too, and Earthworm Tractors had to adapt to the new, post-war Nuclear Age.

Though Alexander Botts is the most visible and well-known character from the Earthworm Tractor Company, the business existed beyond him. Two years before Botts appeared — in the April 25, 1925, issue — the Post printed Upson’s story “The Elephant,” in which salesmen at “the New York branch of the Farmers’ Friend Tractor Company — makers of the famous Earthworm tractors” try to arrange a tug-of-war between their tractor and an elephant in order to land a sale with an Indian timber company. When Alexander Botts appeared in 1927, he was an employee of the Farmers’ Friend Tractor Company, which became the Earthworm Tractor Company in early 1930.

In total, between 1925 and 1934, the Post published 12 Upson stories about the Farmers’ Friend/Earthworm Tractor Company that did not include Alexander Botts. Most of them revolve around the exasperated efforts of sales manager Gilbert Henderson.

All told, the Post published 110 of Upson’s “tractor stories” over an amazing 50 years, from 1925 to 1975. In that time, Botts’s stories were collected in several popular anthologies, and it even made it to the silver screen, in 1936’s Earthworm Tractors, with Joe E. Brown as Botts.

And now, you can read all of them as they appeared in The Saturday Evening Post.

Illustrations

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Members Can Access All of the Alexander Botts Stories

Below is an interactive, searchable chronological list of of all 110 of the Alexander Botts stories published in The Saturday Evening Post, from the first story, “I’m a Natural-Born Salesman” published on April 16, 1927, through “Alexander Botts, Detective” published in the January 1975 issue.

Members can click on the “View the full issue flipbook” link with each story, to be directed to the issue in our archive that contains that story.