Background
Evaleen was born on October 12, 1863 in Lafayette, Indiana, United states, and spent her entire life there.
Her father, John Andrew Stein (1832 - 1886), a Pennsylvania farmer by birth, practised law in Lafayette from his twenty-third year until his death; as a member of the Indiana Senate he drafted the bill which founded Indiana Agricultural College (later Purdue University).
Her mother, Virginia (Tomlinson) Stein (1840 - 1924), was born at Logansport, Indiana, of a pioneer family that had moved westward from Virginia.
Education
After being educated in the public schools of Lafayette, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and did creditable work as a decorative designer, exhibiting illuminated manuscripts at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Chicago, and in other midwestern cities.
Career
It is, however, as a poet and as a writer of children's stories that she gained widest recognition. Her home associations stimulated literary ambitions. Her father contributed verse and essays to local newspapers; her mother was the author of a few short stories for children; and her brother, Orth, was a professional newspaper man and magazine writer.
After her father's death, she became assistant to her mother, who for over thirty years was librarian of the Lafayette public library. At twenty-three she began contributing verse to the Indianapolis Journal and the St. Nicholas magazine.
Her first book of poetry, One Way to the Woods (1897) was followed five years later by a second, Among the Trees Again, and some years later by a book of verse for children, Child Songs of Cheer (1918), and two volumes of translations, Little Poems from Japanese Anthologies (1925) and Poems of Giovanni Pascoli (1923).
The majority of her poems describe with accurate and keenly-observed detail the seasons and the moods of nature, and express a sincere and ardent joy in natural objects; the best of them have a lilting cadence, as in "By the Kankakee, " or a rush and sweep of verse, as in "A Song of Thought. "
In January 1900 she published in St. Nicholas a Christmas story for children, entitled "Felix"; three years later she included it in Troubadour Tales, the first of a number of children's books.
Her knowledge of the art of illuminating manuscripts is evident in the second of these, Gabriel and the Hour Book (1906), and her interest in medieval France, awakened by her study of the art of illumination, appears in A Little Shepherd of Provence (1910), The Little Count of Normandy (1911), Pepin: A Tale of Twelfth Night (1924), and several of her short stories.
In 1907 she traveled in Europe for a few months, but except for this tour and an earlier trip to California she scarcely left Indiana.
She died in 1923.
Personality
Gentle and quiet in manner, she spent her leisure among books, cultivating her garden, or enjoying the natural beauties of the countryside.
