After his film career ended, Schenck traveled the South Seas and wrote two books about Samoa, Hawaii, Tahiti, etc.: Come Unto These Yellow Sands and Lean with the Wind: a novel of the South Seas. In Come Unto These Yellow Sands he briefly mentions his movie career and the fact that a class on anthropology in college attracted him to the South Seas.
In his book Come Unto These Yellow Sands (published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1940) Schenck mentions that he developed "kleig eyes" while working on one of his last films and so ended up in the hospital. It was one of the reasons that he gave up acting.