Ray Stannard Baker was an American journalist who used the pen name David Grayson. After law school he worked as a journalist in 1892 with the Chicago News-Record, where he covered the Pullman Strike and Coxey's Army in 1894. Baker wrote eight books of essays and observations on life's simple pleasures. Adventures in Contentment was the first of these books written ten years before Great Possessions. Grayson talks of the earth and the tastes and smells he has encountered. His observations about life and the world around him are classic. He talks not of the outer visible life of a man, but rather of the inner thoughts and experiences that are in their own way much more fulfilling.