Stratton-Porter, Gene (1863-1924)

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Stratton-Porter, Gene (1863-1924)

Gene Stratton-Porter was a popular author, photographer, and illustrator whose prolific output of romance-spiced nature writings found an enthusiastic audience with middle-class Americans in the early 1900s. Her 26 books have been through multiple editions (many of the titles still in print at the close of the century), and the most popular of these sold millions of copies in the years leading up to and encompassing World War I.

Stratton-Porter's novels have not endured on the basis of their literary merit. Even at the height of her popularity, critics were not fond of her work, which they considered to be formulaic and unrealistic. The broad appeal of Stratton-Porter's fiction lay in her unique and seemingly effortless ability to portray and foster the vicarious involvement of the reader in the vivid and detailed goings-on of natural dramas: the hatching of great moths, the breeding and nesting of birds, the gurglings and whisperings and unfoldings of swamp and woodland. Nature writing was already an established and successful genre, with authors such as John Burroughs, Ernest Thompson Seton, and John Muir. Stratton-Porter added her own twist, tempering the nature message with enough romantic fiction to engage the reader's interest.

Stratton-Porter wrote what she knew best. Born Geneva Stratton, the youngest of 12 children, in Wabash County, Indiana, she spent long unsupervised hours in fascinated contemplation of the plant and wildlife that abounded in what was as yet largely untamed wilderness. When her family moved into town in her 11th year, she took with her a collection of pet birds. Marriage, in 1886, to Charles Darwin Porter, and the birth of her only daughter, Jeannette, two years later, kept Stratton-Porter occupied with homely concerns, but the family's move to Geneva, Indiana, in 1890 placed her adjacent to a unique natural setting—Limberlost Swamp. Here, in the kind of personal metamorphosis characteristic of her future plots, Stratton-Porter became the Bird Woman. Bored and discontented with the social boundaries of small-town housewifery, and spurred by the chance pairing of a gift camera with the need to illustrate some writing projects on bird life, Stratton-Porter took to the swamp.

The long and arduous field hours and her bird studies, at which she became increasingly proficient, provided not only the raw material for her nonfiction, but also the experiences, observations, and many of the characterizations (modeled after interactions with farmers, loggers, and other people she found in the swamp) for her fiction. Her first book, The Song of the Cardinal (1903), illustrated with her own photographs and detailing the life of a cardinal and its mate, was well-received, albeit by a small audience.

Stratton-Porter decided to try her hand at a second book—natural history with, this time, a human love story running through it—and Freckles (1904) set the stage for the rest of her career. While publishers were initially concerned about the predominating natural world in her work, Stratton-Porter's adamance that it remain, and her subsequent sales records, won the day. Those of her novels to achieve bestseller status were Freckles, A Girl of the Limberlost (1909), Laddie (1913), and Michael O'Halloran (1915). Recognizing that her fiction found better sales than her natural history works, Stratton-Porter arranged with her publishers to alternate nonfiction with the novels. What I Have Done with Birds (1907) and Moths of the Limberlost (1912) are representative of the best of her nonfiction. They tended to be lavishly produced volumes with her own photographic illustrations accompanied by text in a descriptive, informal style. This presentation, while accurate in great detail, appealed more to nature lovers than naturalists, and contributed to her recognition as a novelist rather than for the substantial contributions she made to photography and bird behavior studies.

Stratton-Porter's interests and abilities coalesced with a literary output for which an American readership lay ready and waiting. She wrote about nature when nature-writing was in vogue. She wrote overwhelmingly positive and uplifting stories—her primary theme being the overcoming of personal obstacles through faith, trust, and hard work in the atmosphere of peace bestowed by interaction with nature—at a time when Americans were not only avid consumers of fiction but were attracted to themes that would, however temporarily, divert them from the urban grind and the grim reality of World War I.

Stratton-Porter's exposure benefited from yet another popular medium with the proliferation of women's magazines. She had regularly contributed articles to publications such as Outing and Recreation, but in 1921 she was approached by McCall's and offered an editorial page. "Gene Stratton-Porter's Page" gave her a powerful forum for disseminating her message of positive thinking and right living. Novel serializations and poems appeared in Good Housekeeping as well.

Not surprisingly, Stratton-Porter's success drew the attention of Hollywood. She had moved from Indiana to California in 1920 and had initially contracted with filmmaker Thomas Inca, billing "Clean Pictures for Clean People." Dissatisfied with the results of the first project to produce Michael O'Halloran, and by now a very wealthy and determined woman, Stratton-Porter established her own production company. Ultimately seven of her novels were made into films.

In 1924 Stratton-Porter died in an automobile accident. At the close of the twentieth century her novels no longer are sought by mainstream readers, but they are still on the shelves of public and academic libraries; especially Freckles, which remains after others have been relegated to storage. Stratton-Porter and her audience were made for each other, her work providing a gentle reflection of American mores and desires that saw drastic change in the years between the two world wars.

—Karen Hovde