A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 The artist was Gene Stratton-Porter, an intrepid naturalist, novelist, photographer and movie producer who described and dramatized the Limberlost over and over, and so, even a century after her death, served as a catalyst for saving this portion of it. It’s not obvious to the naked eye, but life here is imitating art imitating life. Today, a piece of the old Limberlost survives in the Loblolly Marsh Nature Preserve, 465 acres of restored swampland in the midst of Indiana’s endless industrial corn and soybean fields. He either returned alive or died in the quicksand and quagmires, depending which version you hear. Some say an agile man known as “Limber” Jim Corbus once got lost there. Nobody knows the true origin of the name. I am walking on a trail in a part of northeast Indiana that in the 19th century was impenetrable swamp and forest, a wilderness of some 13,000 acres called the Limberlost. More than ten feet tall, with a central taproot reaching even deeper underground, this plant, with its elephant-ear leaves the texture of sandpaper, makes me feel tipsy and small, like Alice in Wonderland. Yellow sprays of prairie dock bob overhead in the September morning light. –Gene Stratton-Porter, l etter to Miss Mabel Anderson, March 9, 1923 Hereafter to tack the 'ess' on to 'author', because one who writesĪ book or poem is an author and literature has no sex.

In the first place will you allow me to suggest that you forget

A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter