From Fred Murray (personal correspondence) - In 1948, Wendell Johnson and his family were guests in my San Francisco home. Later, I stayed for a few days in their Iowa City home. His initial book, Because I Stutter, Appleton, 1930 portrays, better than any work I know, the situation of a severe stutterer and its influence upon one's life. These at home visits allowed me to probe into what he had written in that autobiography. It was evident that his whole concept of stuttering had changed in the (then) two decades since the book came out. He expressed some regret, I felt, for having said many things in that book. It seemed that he believed he had focused too much on the negative factors and that his perspective at that more recent time was one of providing much more hope to stutterers. Indeed, his communicative skills demonstrated this. At present, my belief is that this 1930 book gives a good account of life before the therapeutic endeavors and that later years demonstrated both orally and in written form, what can be accomplished via meaningful intervention into stuttering.
Wendell Johnson And Charles Van Riper: A Remembrance of Them and Their Era by Dave Williams