When Gene Stratton-Porter died at the age of sixty-one on 6 December 1924, she was one of America's most popular novelists and the best known of the many Indiana authors. At the time of her death her publishers estimated that she had more than fifty million readers-in the United States and many more throughout the world. In the last seventeen years of her life her books sold at a rate of 1,700 copies a day. Although her novels were not well received by literary crities, the traditional values and reverence for nature that they reflect continue to attract an admiring and responsive audience. Many of her novels have been issued in new editions, and demand among antique collectors for original editions is intense. However, until now, this famous Hoosier has been neglected by biographers. Judith Reick Long and the Indiana Historical Society seek to correct this injustice with Gene Stratton-Porter: Novelist and Naturalist, a balanced account of Stratton-Porter that shows both her strengths and her weaknesses and offers a few surprises along the way.