The Harvester

Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921. Later printing. Hardcover. Very good. Signed on the front free endpaper in green ink by Gene Stratton-Porter, and opposite with a small photo of her pasted to the lower left corner of the pastedown. No edition stated, but this is a later printing. Her fifth novel, originally published in 1911, it's a romance inspired by the life of Henry David Thoreau--juicy (and an important nod to an influence)! The book reached "number one" on the bestseller lists in 1912. Gene Stratton-Porter's own influence in American environmental writing may be hard to overstate. She wrote initially from Limberlost Cabin in Geneva, Indiana, near the Limberlost Swamp that was her inspiration for both novels and her nonfiction. She also was an accomplished and pioneering photographer of nature, training her camera especially on Limberlost Swamp, which she roamed and waded habitually, and where she spent days in blinds to get photographs of birds. She worked out a deal with Doubleday in 1910 in which she could alternate the submission of a romance novel and a nonfiction book every year--her commitment to nonfiction, though it sold meagerly by comparison, is notable. Especially via her novels, she helped steer later generations including writers like Annie Dillard and Ann Zwinger who have both cited her novel A Girl of the Limberlost, her most successful and best-known book, as an important early influence. There's this amazing fact from a Smithsonian article: "Only 55 books published between 1895 and 1945 sold upwards of one million copies. Gene Stratton-Porter wrote five of those books."  In addition to her huge hand in nature education, she also was an activist: Her first published article, in 1900, was against the millinery trade, the use of plumes in fashion, and after Limberlost Swamp was largely drained and cut for timber (she moved away, it upset her so much),  she continued to write about the issue of wetland and lake drainage nationally. Octavo, black cloth, gold topstain. A very good copy with a little rubbing to corners and spine ends and toning to text block faces, otherwise crisp and clean. Stratton-Porter's bibliographer writes that she did not sign many books because she was "jealous of her privacy" and the market seems to bear that out. A nice find.