Gene Stratton Porter, Best-Seller

Prepared by the staff of the Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County April, 1953
Although Gene Stratton Porter resided in this city only a few weeks in 1913, her life was closely associated with the Fort Wayne area. Born in rural Wabash County and educated in Wabash, the noted Hoosier author established residence successively in Geneva, Decatur, and Rome City. She was intimately connected with Coldwater, Michigan, and Winchester, Indiana; and her literary and social activities frequently brought her to the Summit City, where she had close relatives, friends, and admirers. The G. R. & I. Railroad linked together many of the communities where she lived her formative years and was the chief mode of transportation in her youth.
Gene Stratton Porter was neither a classicist, nor a naturalist, nor yet a realist in literature. Some critics have denominated her writings “opiates for the masses”; others characterized them as being of “molasses sweetness”; still others found them too imaginary. Certainly a best-seller in her day, she was a romanticist in the best Hoosier tradition of George Barr McCutcheon, Meredith Nicholson, and David Graham Phillips—those other best-sellers of that golden day of Indiana authors. President William Lowe Bryan of Indiana University once included her in a list of fourteen best-selling Indiana authors. In the larger national field of literature, her place is with those other contemporary best-sellers, Harold Bell Wright and Harold McGrath.
Gene Stratton Porter won wide popularity and a special place in the hearts of her readers; no contemporary author was better loved or acclaimed by the reading public. Fifty million readers of her own day enshrined her in their affections; countless thousands of later generations still read her volumes avidly and experience the same pleasant and refreshing glow as did their grandparents, parents, uncles, and aunts in the first quarter of this century. Although the professional literary critics found no especial merit in her works, Mrs. Porter was amply rewarded, both by royalties from the sale of her books and the acclaim of a large segment of the reading public who found inspiration and recreation in her words. Indeed, the financial returns from her works were seldom surpassed in her day by other contemporary authors.