“To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows him where he can be…gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier, it is a wonder-working book.”Gene Stratton-Porter
During the first half of the 20th century, only 55 books in publication sold more than one million copies. Hoosier novelist and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter penned five of those works, more than any other writer in history at that time.
More than Jack London.
More than Rudyard Kipling.
More than Mark Twain.
She was not only popular, but also prolific. She published her first book in 1903. And within a short, twenty-year career as a writer, she authored 12 novels, eight nonfiction nature studies, two children’s books and four books of poetry and essays. Gene’s life and works are the subject of a new, two-hour WTIU/PBS documentary special Gene Stratton-Porter: Music of the Wild, which will premiere in March 2027.
Gene discovered a creative spark as a writer from the time she was a teenager. Refusing once to complete a school assignment in mathematics – Gene despised math class – she deliberately ignored her teacher and instead submitted a paper about one of her favorite childhood novels. Fully expecting to be disciplined in front of the class, she was surprised when, in fact, the teacher applauded her for her writing, even bringing in the superintendent of schools to listen to Gene recite her paper aloud. “I was too amazed to speak,” she wrote later. “My paper was good. It was as good as I had believed it.”
Her first published novel was The Song of the Cardinal in 1903. New to the publishing world, Gene naively thought she could simply walk into a publisher’s office and present an unedited manuscript for immediate consideration. Upon completing the document, she boarded a train to Indianapolis, manuscript in hand, and marched into the offices of the Bobbs Merrill Company. Surprisingly, editor Hewitt Howland agreed to see her. And even more surprisingly, he found Gene’s work delightful and offered to publish the book. The Song of the Cardinal was a tale of a pair of cardinals living in the Limberlost Swamp, a thick wilderness area near Stratton-Porter’s home in Geneva, Indiana. The book enjoyed moderate success. But the publication sparked a type of confidence in Gene that fueled her writing for the next two decades.
The Limberlost would serve as a natural backdrop for several other novels by Gene Stratton-Porter. Her first love was nature writing, and she spent much of her early career walking through the woods and marshlands of northeastern Indiana, filling notebooks with detailed records of nesting, feeding and migratory patterns of various bird species and other bits of wildlife she encountered daily in the marshlands and hardwood forests. Editors for various publishing houses tried to encourage her to “lose the nature stuff,” but Gene steadfastly refused. In fact, the natural environment played such a significant role in many of her novels that the Limberlost itself became a type of “character” that interacted with the people and plotlines within her storytelling. As she witnessed more and more wild lands being swallowed up by the “progress” of mass industrialization near the turn of the 20th century, Gene grew concerned for the environmental health of the area and reasoned that if nature itself played a significant role in her stories, readers would engage in a deeper relationship with the forests, fields and lakes she featured in her books.
Her most successful business partnership was with Frank Doubleday of Doubleday, Page and Company publishers in New York. Doubleday’s wife Nelly was a fan of Gene’s nature writing and encouraged her husband to offer a longstanding contract to the Hoosier writer. Gene’s novels, such as Freckles, A Girl of the Limberlost and The Harvester were all hugely popular with her audiences and sold millions of copies, including translations into more than 20 languages, including Braille. Ever the shrewd businesswoman, Gene negotiated a deal with Doubleday to publish one nonfiction nature study for each of the best-selling novels she would write for the company. Almost without exception, she would publish a new book each year on her birthday, alternating one nonfiction book for each novel she wrote.
Today, nearly 50 million copies of Gene Stratton-Porter’s novels and nonfiction nature studies have been sold worldwide. Many have never gone out of print. Several of her novels were turned into motion pictures, some by her own production company, Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, one of the first Hollywood production companies owned and operated by a woman. Gene died suddenly in a car accident in Los Angeles in December 1924. Her obituary ran on page one of the New York Times and hundreds of other national and international newspapers and magazines. At the time, her name was one of the most famous in American literature.
At the time of her death, she was one of the wealthiest women in America, a millionaire with four homes – two in Indiana and two in California. She had just built a 22-room mansion in the hills outside Los Angeles that would later become the posh neighborhood of Bel Air. At that point, she was not only a popular author, but also a successful speaker, renowned nature photographer and film producer – all of this as the result of her stubbornness as a teen, refusing to complete a math assignment and instead exploring the world as a writer.
Reflecting on her career as a novelist, she once wrote, “I am a creature so saturated with earth, water and air that if I do not periodically work some of it out of my system in ink, my nearest and dearest cannot live with me. When such a time overtakes me, I write as the birds sing, because I must, and usually from the same source of Inspiration.”
The new WTIU/PBS documentary Gene Stratton-Porter: Music of the Wild, premieres nationally on PBS stations in March 2027. It is through financial support from foundations, corporate sponsors and individual viewers like you that we can continue to share the stories of our past and celebrate writers like Gene Stratton-Porter, who captured the collective imagination of millions of readers through her storytelling.
Thank you for your continued support of quality documentary programs on WTIU and PBS.
