When Gene Stratton-Porter died in 1924, she was one of America’s most popular novelists and the best-known Indiana author. In this first complete account of Stratton-Porter’s life, Judith Reick Long reveals the author of sentimental and simple nature tales as a much more complex individual than she has heretofore been considered.
Of all the books written by Hoosier writers, Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost is unquestionably the most cherished: the timeless story of an impoverished young girl, Elnora Comstock, growing up on the edge of the Limberlost swamp. Elnora Comstock has served as a role model for successive generations of independent young readers.
To me the Limberlost is a word with which to conjure; a spot wherein to revel. The swamp lies in north-eastern Indiana, nearly one hundred miles south of the Michigan line and ten west of the Ohio. In its day it covered a large area. When I arrived; there were miles of unbroken forest, lakes provided with boats for navigation, streams of running water, the roads around the edges corduroy, made by felling and sinking large trees in the muck.
She had taken possession of the sumac. The location was her selection and he loudly applauded her choice. She placed the first twig, and after examining it carefully, he spent the day carrying her others just as much alike as possible. If she used a dried grass blade, he carried grass blades until she began dropping them on the ground.
Set in the author's adopted home of California in the 1920s, this is Gene Stratton-Porter's last novel, a story filled with wisdom, a love of nature, and her own abiding optimism. In it a Master Bee Keeper, his bees, and the natural beauty of California restore a wounded World War I veteran to health.
At the age of five Amaryllis had been separated from her family by the ‘judge with the big knife’ – who had put her in one big house and her brother in another, while her selfish father and frivolous mother went their ways. But Amaryllis ran away to the magic garden. There she found John Guido, who played the violin to her while she danced in the moonlight. One happy hour, that was all, and then she was brought back. But Amaryllis came again to the magic garden, and the bud of childhood friendship blossomed there into the flower of perfect love. There is happiness in THE MAGIC GARDEN, filled as it is with the glory of flowers and music; with laughter and tears, and with the inspiration of this best-loved writer, GENE STRATTON-PORTER.
Another early 20th-century classic from the remarkable pen of Gene Stratton-Porter. Set in Rainbow Bottom along the Wabash River, At the Foot of the Rainbow tells of the lives of a dissipated Irishman, Jimmy Malone, his long-suffering wife Mary, and Jimmy's boyhood friend and lifelong companion, Dannie Macnoun.
When orphaned Freckles gets a job watching Mr. McLean's valuable Limberlost timber, he thinks that he has at last found a home. But the Limberlost gives him much more than that--a lasting knowledge of nature, a woman who loves him, and the secret of his noble birth. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
“Homing with the Birds” is a book in which one comes into intimate contact with one's feathered friends, to the extent of feeling that they actually have personalities! This is doubtless because Mrs. Porter is a true and devoted friend to them herself, and has been so since her childhood. She says: "Almost my first distinct memory is connected with a bird." and then proceeds to tell how this was upon an occasion when she was willing to deny herself the joy of eating cherries in order that woodpeckers in the neighborhood might not be killed! Many such incidents of the author's childhood are in the book, demonstrating her intense, almost romantic, attachment to the feathered tribes. The book is more than a record of bird life, it is that of a charming young, growing human life deeply concerned with the things of nature. At the same time it is full of information not only delightful but useful for birdlovers and students of natural history and outdoor matters.
The narrative mode of 'Laddie' may prevent an easy suspension of disbelief to some readers. It is told in the first person by the eight- or ten-year-old Little Sister but from the later position of adulthood.