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...