A New England literary mystery: Who really wrote these best-selling guides to country living?

Between 1906 and 1916, the identity of David Grayson was the best-kept secret in American publishing.

At least six impostors gave talks pretending to be Grayson. One convinced a woman to marry him after telling her he had written the books, whose narrator is a winsome and articulate philosopher-farmer who has left the city for the country. In books with titles like “The Friendly Road” and “Adventures in Friendship,” Grayson walks around visiting people and meeting strangers, demonstrating the values of hospitality and trustworthiness.

“The great point of advantage in the life of the country is that if a man is in reality simple, if he love true contentment, it is the place of all places where he can live his life most freely and fully, where he can grow,” Grayson wrote in “Adventures in Contentment.” “The city affords no such opportunity; indeed, it often destroys, by the seductiveness with which it flaunts its carnal graces, the desire for the higher life which animates every good man.”

Readers from all over the world wrote to Grayson to express how much his books meant to them. The town library in Amherst houses 4,700 of these letters. A hundred years ago, Grayson was much better known around the world than an earlier Amherst writer, Emily Dickinson.

“Yours was a new gospel of life to us, urging beauty, simplicity and the commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest things that come nearest happiness,” wrote a reader, Ethel Bradley.

Dan O’Brien wrote to Grayson in 1913 from Shanghai, where he was stationed on an American ship. “You have made me forget for a time that I was in a place where dreamers are not wanted,” he wrote.

A reader who had become disfigured as a soldier in World War I wrote of Grayson’s “Adventures in Contentment”: “It is my greatest friend. I owe everything to this book, for it gave me peace of mind when the bitterness of despair was still in my heart.”

The invention of David Grayson grew out of a call for submissions to The American Magazine, where Baker was associate editor and worked with fellow muckrakers Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens. Baker, then 36, had been for many years writing in his private notebooks about what makes a good life. For the magazine, he turned his jottings into articles.

Of his chosen nom de plume, Baker would later write that it seemed like “a homely name that suited the subject matter.” He didn’t use his real name because he didn’t want to confuse readers who were familiar with his harder-hitting reporting.

To Baker’s surprise, Grayson became a celebrity.

Readers asked for Grayson’s address, or his photo, or invited him to visit them. Many letters were addressed to “David” or “Dear Friend.” Dorothy Verall of Wilmette, Ill., wrote in 1913, “I wish if you are ever in Chicago that you would let me talk with you.”

Not everyone was an admirer. H.L. Mencken wrote: “Mr. Grayson’s sentimentality often descends to the maudlin. I fail to respond to his enthusiasm for yokels, his artful forgetfulness that the country is dull, dirty and uncomfortable, and that countrymen are stupid and rascally.”

Grayson’s publishers, Doubleday, Page & Co., did not reveal their author’s identity. They responded to one inquiring letter-writer that his stories were “partly fiction and partly fact” and revealed only that Grayson lived “on a small New England farm.”

But the longer Grayson’s identity remained a mystery, the more speculation mounted, rumors spread, and pressure for disclosure built. In 1913, a story in the New York Post posited that Baker was Grayson.

Around the same time, Geneva Smithe of Frankfort, Mich., wrote to Grayson’s publishers: “Please tell me the truth about the matter. We can’t quite believe it. We think he must be a man of greater age and he must have lived that very life on the farm.”

Readers were growing impatient. In 1915, Dorothy Seward of Nebraska wrote to Doubleday, Page & Co., “You are doing readers a flagrant injustice unless you tell them who David Grayson is. We can’t wait another year to find out. Some of us will explode!”

That year, W.H.G. Temple of Seattle wrote to Grayson, “Are you real or imaginary?”

Finally, in 1916, partly in response to the impostors claiming credit for his work, Baker came clean. To his surprise, many people had trouble believing that Baker and Grayson were the same person.

Book News Monthly wrote: “There was an apparent discrepancy between the character of David Grayson, the idler by woodland brooks, the poet of the open road, the philosopher of that deepest content in life which may be had by the lowest or the highest, and that of Ray Stannard Baker, the skilled journalist, the investigator thick in the hurly-burly of life.”

One of Baker’s daughters, Rachel Baker Napier, recalled in 1942 that Graysonians would knock on the door of their house hoping to see if Baker and Grayson were indeed one and the same. Some were upset to find that Baker was a married family man in a small town, not a country-dwelling bachelor who lived with his sister.

For his part, Baker wrote: “Scarcely a day passes when I do not receive letters, or visits, asking for autographs, inquiring about first editions, demanding information, or merely praising. It is a weariness, yet somehow it reassures me. My work has not been wholly lost.”

Baker lived in Amherst for the rest of his days. He was an avid beekeeper, cultivated a fruit orchard, and kept hens. As Grayson in “The Countryman’s Year,” published in 1936, he gave a detailed account of the economics of growing onions.

Baker felt that his journalism was of far greater social importance than the Grayson sketches, but he also realized their value to his readers. He wrote late in his life: “They helped make people understand and enjoy their lives a little more deeply and fully, by presenting the beauty of neighborliness, the richness of the quiet life, and the charm of common things.”

Nick Grabbe is a retired newspaper editor and writer who lives in Amherst.