Wilcox, Ella Wheeler (1850–1919)

American poet and journalist . Born Ella Wheeler in Johnstown Center, Rock County, near Madison, Wisconsin, on November 5, 1850; died at her home in Short Beach, Connecticut, on October 30, 1919; attended the University of Wisconsin, 1867–68; married Robert Marius Wilcox, in 1884 (died 1916); children: one son, who died at birth.

Born in 1850 in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, Ella Wheeler Wilcox grew up in Windsor and was weaned on the popular novels of E.D.E.N. Southworth, Mary Jane Holmes , and Ouida (Louise de la Ramée ). At age nine, she wrote an 11-chapter novel which was bound in kitchen wallpaper; at age 14, she was published. Following her marriage, Wilcox moved to Connecticut, then New York, where she became a successful contributor to magazines and wrote many short essays for the New York Journal and the Chicago American. Though critics refused to take her work seriously, she found a large public for both her prose and poetry. Her populist career was ensured when one Chicago firm refused to publish a collection of her love poems, calling them immoral. The book Poems of Passion, by the now-dubbed "Poetess of Passion," sold 60,000 copies in 1883.

Wilcox produced over 20 volumes of verse and contributed a daily poem for newspaper syndication. Along with two autobiographies, The Story of a Literary Career (1905) and The Worlds and I (1918), her books included a collection of temperance verses entitled Drops of Water (1872), Sweet Danger (1902), The Heart of New Thought (about spiritualism, 1902), and The Art of Being Alive (1914). Following her husband's death, Wilcox became involved in the spiritualist movement, intent on contacting him. She had a nervous breakdown in 1919 and died three months later.