Gertrude Atherton

Background

Gertrude Atherton was born on the 30th October 1857 in San Francisco, California, United States, she was the daughter of Thomas Ludovich (in business) and Gertrude Franklin Horn. By age 30 she had tried to concentrate on her own career.

Education

All her life she was educated in private schools.

Career

Gertrude's novelist and short-story writer. In her fiction, Atherton “redefined women’s potential and presented a psychological drama of a woman’s quest for identity and for a life purpose and happiness within and beyond her procreative function,” according to Charlotte S. McClure in a Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) essay. But as the author herself had declared, her true voice came only after her first four novels had been completed. The early four-published between 1888 and 189-tended toward the melodramatic, with plots centering on reincarnation, May-December romance, and the consequences of promiscuity.

Achievements

• Gertrude has got loads of awards such as International Academy of Letters and Sciences of Italy Gold Medal which named Legion of Honor honorary member in 1925.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Californians

    (Renowned for her realistic, intricate portraits of human ...)

    1898
  • California an Intimate History

    (California an Intimate History [Gertrude Atherton] on Ama...)

    1914
  • The Conqueror

    (London published Fiction)

    1902

Politics

Atherton developed a hostility to Communism both as Fascism. She considered Communism the greater evil and added, 'Although I have no love for Franco, I hope he will mop up the Communists, and send home, with tails between legs, all those gullible Americans who enlisted to save Spanish "Democracy"'.

Personality

In later years, Atherton produced a number of social histories, but it is for her fiction that she will be best remembered.

Quotes from others about the person

• "By being indomitably strenuous and tough-minded, she has held the nose of her readers to the grindstone of contemporary problems. She will probably live in American literature as H. G. Wells [does] in English, as the most responsive receiving-set for the predominant waves of popular intellection throughout her era.”

Connections

Gertrude was married to George H. Bowen Atherton in 1876.

Father:

Thomas Ludovich

Mother:

Gertrude Franklin Horn

husband:

George H. Bowen Atherton

References

• California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times
  1991