Eleanor H. Porter, writer of popular novels and short stories, is remembered today chiefly for one book, her best-seller Pollyanna (1913). She was born Eleanor Hodgman in Littleton, New Hampshire, where she grew up; later she went to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory of Music, and for several years she made a career of singing in public concerts, private homes, and church choirs. In 1892 she married John Lyman Porter, a Boston businessman, and for the rest of her life she lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

She began her writing career with short stories (using the pseudonym Eleanor Stewart) which were published in popular women's magazines; in 1907 her first novel, Cross Currents, appeared. During the next thirteen years she wrote thirteen more novels, all of which sold respectably and most of which were reprinted at least once. Two of her novels, Miss Billy (1911) and Just David (1916), were best-sellers...