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Gene tratton-Porter was an American novelist and nature writer.
Background
She was born on August 17, 1863 on a farm in Wabash County, Indiana, United States, the youngest of twelve children of the Rev. Mark Stratton, a licensed Methodist minister, and Mary Stratton. Tracing his ancestry to British antiquity, the father as a farmer-preacher combined tenacity with loftiness of purpose and a love of nature with bookishness. His wife, of Dutch ancestry, loved flowers and distilled perfumes.
Each child in this large family had specific household tasks, and Geneva, as she was named, fed the chickens and gathered eggs. Freed by her mother's broken health from rigorous routine, she ran wild in the woods, gathered Indian relics and bird feathers, caught butterflies and moths, and located as many as sixty-four bird nests in one year. Her father, whose death occurred on January 10, 1890, encouraged with Biblical injunctions her gentle friendliness toward wild creatures; his Spartan discipline in language and manners grew rigid upon his wife's death in February 1875.
Porter's writing is autobiographical, and incidents are drawn from the lives of her parents, brothers, and sisters.
Education
In October 1874, the Strattons moved to Wabash, Ind. , where Geneva continued in school until 1883; she missed receiving a diploma by withdrawing to nurse a sick sister.
Career
After her marriage Gene, as she now called herself, at once demonstrated advanced literary ideas in a eulogy of Walt Whitman. She and her husband designed Limberlost Cabin, a fourteen-room red cedar log house, the name of which was taken from Limberlost Swamp, located south of Geneva.
Much of Mrs. Porter's time was devoted to nature study in the swamp. After trying painting, she studied photography and pictured fascinating details of nature. To Recreation, a magazine, she sent photographs and natural history hints in return for photographic equipment. A disagreement transplanted her to the staff of Outing. A first trial at fiction, "Laddie, the Princess, and the Pie, " was published in the Metropolitan of September 1901. Amusingly enough, the editor lost the author's address, and she experienced the thrill of unexpectedly seeing her story in print.
Planning a career in fiction, she sent a ten-thousand-word story to R. W. Gilder, who advised expansion of the manuscript to book length; it became The Song of the Cardinal (1903), the life history of a redbird. In Freckles (1904) she joined bird lore to sentimental heart interest in a story about a waif who guards the timber in Limberlost. Thereafter, vying with Harold Bell Wright's in circulation, her books reached a total sale of ten million copies by the time of her death.
In 1907 she published At the Foot of the Rainbow, which combines a heroic Scotsman, a dissipated Irishman, and his long-suffering wife in a triangle; in 1909, A Girl of the Limberlost, a continuation of Freckles, with moths and a girl as its chief subjects; in 1911, The Harvester, which recounts a young man's success in earning a livelihood in the woods. Mrs. Porter idealized her childhood in Laddie (1913), a picture of her elder brother's wooing.
Her later novels present, in different settings, the same kinds of ingredients: Michael O'Halloran (1915), A Daughter of the Land (1918) and others.
After the First World War, which stirred her deeply, she moved to California. In 1922 she wrote editorials for McCall's Magazine, and she organized a company to produce films of her novels. Her fear of the Japanese in California led to a discussion of the "yellow peril" in Her Father's Daughter (1921).
She was injured fatally when her limousine was struck by a trolley car in Los Angeles.
Achievements
As one of America's most popular novelists, Gene Stratton-Porter in all sincerity brought her millions of readers a well-mixed compound of idealism, heroism, self-sacrifice, sentimentality, uplift, romance, and nature lore. Her twenty-six published books include twelve novels, eight nature studies, two books of poetry, and four collections of stories and children's books. Primarily, she is known for her best-selling novel A Girl of the Limberlost and columns for national magazines, such as McCall's and Good Housekeeping. Besides, she was also a silent film-era producer who founded her own production company, Gene Stratton Porter Productions.
Stratton-Porter, who is remembered for her ambition and individualism, was also a passionate nature lover who encouraged people to explore the nature and the outdoors. She especially loved birds and did extensive studies of moths.
Connections
She married Charles Dorwin Porter, a druggist of Geneva, Indiana on April 21, 1886. They established their residence in Decatur, later in Geneva. Mr. Porter prospered; he organized and headed a bank, leased his farm, and sixty producing oil wells were drilled on it.
Her husband and their daughter, Jeannette, survived her.
