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    The Harvester
    The Harvester
    The Harvester
    Ebook558 pages8 hours

    The Harvester

    By Gene Stratton-Porter

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    According to Wikipedia: "Gene Stratton-Porter (August 17, 1863 – December 6, 1924) was an American author, amateur naturalist, wildlife photographer, and one of the earliest women to form a movie studio and production company. She wrote some of the best selling novels and well-received columns in magazines of the day... She became a wildlife photographer, specializing in the birds and moths in one of the last of the vanishing wetlands of the lower Great Lakes Basin. The Limberlost and Wildflower Woods of northeastern Indiana were the laboratory and inspiration for her stories, novels, essays, photography, and movies. Although there is evidence that her first book was "Strike at Shane's", which was published anonymously, her first attributed novel, The Song of the Cardinal met with great commercial success. Her novels Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost are set in the wooded wetlands and swamps of the disappearing central Indiana ecosystems she loved and documented. She eventually wrote over 20 books. Although Stratton-Porter wanted to focus on nature books, it was her romantic novels that made her famous and generated the finances that allowed her to pursue her nature studies. She was an accomplished author, artist and photographer and is generally considered to be one of the first female authors to promulgate public positions — in her case, conserving the Limberlost Swamp."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeltzer Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2018
    ISBN9781455317554
    Author

    Gene Stratton-Porter

    Gene Stratton-Porter (1863-1924) was an American author, photographer, and naturalist. Born in Indiana, she was raised in a family of eleven children. In 1874, she moved with her parents to Wabash, Indiana, where her mother would die in 1875. When she wasn’t studying literature, music, and art at school and with tutors, Stratton-Porter developed her interest in nature by spending much of her time outdoors. In 1885, after a year-long courtship, she became engaged to druggist Charles Dorwin Porter, with whom she would have a daughter. She soon grew tired of traditional family life, however, and dedicated herself to writing by 1895. At their cabin in Indiana, she conducted lengthy studies of the natural world, focusing on birds and ecology. She published her stories, essays, and photographs in Outing, Metropolitan, and Good Housekeeping before embarking on a career as a novelist. Freckles (1904) and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) were both immediate bestsellers, entertaining countless readers with their stories of youth, romance, and survival. Much of her works, fiction and nonfiction, are set in Indiana’s Limberlost Swamp, a vital wetland connected to the Wabash River. As the twentieth century progressed, the swamp was drained and cultivated as farmland, making Stratton-Porter’s depictions a vital resource for remembering and celebrating the region. Over the past several decades, however, thousands of acres of the wetland have been restored, marking the return of countless species to the Limberlost, which for Stratton-Porter was always “a word with which to conjure; a spot wherein to revel.”

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    4.5/5

    53 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Gene Stratton-Porter was fond of writing romantic novels with settings that emphasized the wonders and beauty of nature. The Harvester is one of her most successful works. Like Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost it is set near the fictional Indiana town of Onabasha in 1910. David Langston lives alone in a small cabin on the land where he has established America's only farm devoted to growing wild medicinal plants in their ideal natural conditions. Raised by his mother after his father's death, Langston has spent his life in an effort to be honest, manly, and "clean" (Stratton-Porter's code word for sexual abstinence). Each year he leaves it to his dog to decide whether he should stay on his land, or go to Onabasha to look for a wife, and every year the dog indicates the land is best--until this year. The Harvester is unwilling to change his lifestyle until the night he experiences a wonderful vision of his perfect woman, decides he can't live without her, and begins his search. When he does find her, he also finds that love is a harder thing than he ever anticipated, and that he will need all his strength, courage, patience, and skill to win and to keep his mate. Set in idyllic surroundings, this is one of Stratton-Porter's best-written novels, and the Harvester himself is one of her most memorable characters.
    • 5/5
      Wow. This one starts as a romance, instead of starting as a nature story and growing a romance later - the nature parts are nicely intertwined with the romance. It's truly wonderful - for all the Cinderella aspects. And since the reader has been with him since he fell in love, we can see it from his side with no Cinderella to it at all...Love it. Lots of twists and turns - seems like he keeps bringing men to the house for her to choose from. But a proper happy ending, despite the misunderstandings right near the end. Best Stratton-Porter book yet.
    • 5/5
      I last read this book probably at least 35 years ago, and was surprised at how much I still love it. I read it tonight on Google Books because my Grandma's copy of this is packed away somewhere in my parent's attic. This story, of a very Thoreau-ish young man who lives in the country on 600 acres devoted to medicinal plants and herbs, manages to strike a melancholic note without meaning to. Even a hundred years ago he was on a mission to preserve the disappearing flora from the Indiana country side that had been used in traditional and western medicine. I couldn't help but feel how much more we've probably lost in the hundred years since this book was written.The prose is over-wrought by today's standards, but the story of the plants and the noble man behind their cultivation, and his lovely pure-hearted romance of the delicate and sickly young woman that he comes to love still managed to tug at my heart.It's just a beautiful story and you can't help wishing that there were more men today like David Langston, the Harvester.

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    The Harvester - Gene Stratton-Porter

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