Anson's 1900 book "A Ball Player's Career: Being the Personal Reminiscences of Adrian C. Anson", was ghostwritten by Chicago horse racing writer and poet Richard Cary Jr., who had the pen name of Hyder Ali. Right after it was published, Cary told the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch", "I really thought when I started that the ‘Cap’ would be able to reel off the story of his life about as fast as a nimble man would care to write it. It took me just two days to find that was not the case. A day and a half to get the ‘Cap’ to sit down and the other half day in egging him on. The story had to be literally dragged out of him. The incidents of his baseball career were apparently fresh in his mind, but when it came to actual dates he was all at sea. When he did give a date nine times out of ten it was wrong and had to be corrected later on." "The New York Times" said whether Anson "wrote every word in this volume of reminiscences or not[, the book reads characteristically. The expression is Ansonian."