Ella Wheeler Wilcox
1850 –
1919
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, born on November 5, 1850, in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, was a novelist, playwright, and poet. She was a popular writer characterized mainly by her upbeat and optimistic poetry, though she was also an activist. Her poetry collections include Poems of Passion (W. B. Conkey Company, 1883); Poems of Pleasure (Belford, Clarke, and Company, 1888); and Poems of Peace (Gay & Bird, 1906). Several of her poems served as the bases of four silent films: The Price He Paid (1914), The Beautiful Lie (1917), The Belle of the Season (1919), and The Man Worth While (1921). Her autobiography, The Worlds and I, was published in 1918.
Wheeler Wilcox died at Short Beach in Branford, Connecticut, on October 30, 1919.