Archives West Finding Aid

William Bittle Wells was born in Floyd County, Virginia in 1872. After first moving to California in 1874, Wells' family settled in Portland, Oregon in 1881. He graduated from Stanford University in 1897 with a degree in English and a certificate in education. At Stanford, Wells had developed an interest in publishing and publicity. He was an editor of several school newspapers, including The Daily Palo Alto and Olla Podria.

In 1898 Wells founded the western magazine Pacific Monthly, which featured book reviews, reports on the development of the pacific coast, literature, and humor. Wells made the magazine into an outlet for the work of young American writers. Pacific Monthly was not a financial success, and after he encountered difficulties obtaining editorial assistance, Wells finally sold the magazine in 1906. It was later consolidated with Sunset Magazine.

After severing his ties with Pacific Monthly, Wells began working as an advertising salesman for Sunset Magazine, which had begun as a publication of Southern Pacific Railway. He became northwest editor and manger for the magazine from 1907-1912.

During his tenure with Sunset Magazine, Wells began to publish promotional booklets about regions and cities served by the railroad on the west coast. Under his guidance as manager of Community Publicity, the Harriman Lines railroad began its publicity program with a booklet about the Rouge River Valley and Medford. Wells coordinated not only the advertising for these booklets, but he also oversaw all aspects of the organization of this project, including coordinating writers with the targeted communities.

Wells left Harriman Lines and Community Publicity after Harriman's freight department exerted its influence to eliminate the Sunset Magazine venture, agedly because it adversely affected freight traffic. Although Wells worked hard to counteract these allegations by producing a report with contrary statistics, his efforts proved fruitless. Harriman offered to keep Wells as a passenger agent, but he elected to resign.

Wells next ventured into the printing and publishing business as the proprietor and manager of his own company, Wells and Company, from 1912 to 1915. Wells quickly discovered that he was not suited to the business and abandoned the operation after only three years.

Although at this point Wells was nearly penniless, he undertook the management and editing of a new magazine, Better Cooking, another publicity venture for cities across the nation. The venture was short-lived; Wells and the owner failed to agree on the direction of the magazine. After two years, Wells once again found himself looking for work.

In 1917, Wells signed a contract with New York Life Insurance Company where he worked during he next forty years. During his career in insurance, Wells not only sold insurance but also wrote promotional literature about the sale and benefit of insurance for businesses and the general public, including The Beneficiary of Partnership Insurance.

Highly successful as an agent, Wells interrupted his insurance career only during World War II when he worked in the shipyards of the Willamette Iron and Steel Company (WISCO) as chief clerk, editor, and inventory technician. Wells retired from the insurance business in 1940 when he was seventy. Near the end of his career, he had developed an intense interest in religion. After he retired, he spent the remaining eighteen years of his life writing extensively on Christian religious topics. He published several booklets, including Studies in Modernism, Heirs of Promise, and What Shall We Do with Christianity, in which he speculated on the role of religion in mid-century America. He died in 1960 at the age of eighty-eight.