C.K.Ober
One of the most prominent authors within this collection was Charles Kellog Ober, a high-ranking official within the YMCA. He started out as the Field Secretary of the International Committee of the organization and was later put into the position of the YMCA Special Secretary in France and England during World War I. (1) Ober first joined the YMCA after a harrowing trip to sea where he was lost for more than a week. He credited this experience with giving him such a fervent appetite for religion and joined the YMCA to inspire this faith in others.
He did so by writing these pamphlets and short stories during the first world war. The pamphlet “Out of the Fog” was a narrative based on his experience of being lost at sea. The short stories that he produced were meant to entertain men at war and inspire thoughts and conversation on the topics of morality and the Christian faith. Such as when he states “I feel more like claiming fellowship with the ‘wanderer’ who called the place of his hardship ‘Bethel’ because it was there, at the end of self and of favoring conditions, that he found God.” (2) He attempts to create characters that soldiers can relate to, men who find themselves in their darkest hour and use proper judgment and faith in the Christian god to pull themselves through in hopes that the soldiers he is writing to will do the same.