Nature and Women in the Novels of Bess Streeter Aldrich

Bess Streeter Aldrich (1881 – 1954) was one of the most prominent and popular of the many "regionalist" novelists in 19th and 20th century North America. Her most popular book, A Lantern In Her Hand came out in 1928 and had twenty printings before 1930. It has been translated into more than twenty languages and has not yet been out of print. All of her novels have been published in Braille and all are now in print in paperback. Her best selling novel, Miss Bishop (1940) was made into a popular movie called “Cheers for Miss Bishop” staring Paul Muni (1941). She is included in at least 19 compendia of literary and historical biography such as The Oxford Companion to American Literature, The Dictionary of American Biography, and The Readers Encyclopedia. Numerous magazine articles and four book length biographies of her life have been published (Marble, 1929; Williams, 1935; Martin, 1992, Peterson, 1995) and four Ph.D. dissertations have been written about her literary works and her social significance (Foreman, 1982; Jessup, 1985; Keating, 1985, Peterson, 1992). When she died, obituaries appeared in Time (volume 94) and Newsweek (volume 60) magazines (16th of August, 1954) and the New York Times.