Gertrude Atherton , novelist, social historian, and journalist, reflected in her writings the evolution of American society from a double-Western point of view. She is best known for a fictionized biography of Alexander Hamilton, The Conqueror (1902), and Black Oxen, a best-selling novel of the 1920s. Born in San Francisco, the daughter of a New England businessman transplanted in California and of a Southern belle, she used her heritage and birthplace as motifs in her works to portray with an ironic eye the "life and times" of the Western civilization that evolved from Europe.

Her parents' divorce and the decline of the family fortune gave Atherton an unsettled childhood and adolescence, but these vicissitudes appeared to nurture what she called the "rotten spot" in her brain, the source of her fictions, her intellectual aspiration, and her desire to play a different role from that of a traditional woman. Nonetheless, for...