One of My Favorite

I love Gene Stratton Porter books. There has been only one of hers that I did not like, and I can't even remember its title. If you are able to find the originals, they usually have good illustrations.

Gene Stratton Porter (1863-1924) was an american novelist. She wrote often of nature: plants, animals, and the woods. She is best known for her book Girl of the Limberlost. Also well-

known, the book Freckles. Her husband Charles D. Porter started the Bank of Geneva in Indiana.

I think my favorite is The Harvestor. In this book, she paints a beautiful picture of a lakeside cabin. (Apparently developed from her own house she and her husband lived in near the swamp.) The hero is a man. I laugh at my lack of description, but truly, I cannot put it into words, you'll just have to read the book. He is the type of guy that makes modern novel heroes look like wimps....

We own quite a few (or rather my brother owns the books, since he bought them). Among my favorite are Laddie a story told through the eyes of a young girl -- this book is somewhat autobiographical, and Keeper of the Bees --which is about a guy who has just escaped from a army hospital....long story, again you would have to read them.

"For every bad man and woman I have ever known, I have met . . . an overwhelming number of thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish high ideals, and it is upon the lives of these people that I base what I write. To contend that this does not produce a picture true to life is idiocy. It does. It produces a picture true to ideal life; to the best that good men and good women can do at level best.

I care very little for the . . . critics who proclaim that there is no such thing as a moral man, and that my pictures of life are sentimental and idealized. They are! And I glory in them! They are straight, living pictures from the lives of men and women of morals, honor, and loving kindness. . . .

Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun to teach, whether they really believe it or not, that no book is true to life unless it is true to the worst in life."
— Gene Stratton-Porter