Portal:Golden Age of Indiana Literature

Primarily a political writer, Robert Dale Owen was a Scotland-born socialist member of Congress whose writings also covered religious topics, memoir, and architecture. He also composed letters with literary figures and died as the Golden Age was beginning.

Sarah T. Bolton was a Kentucky-born poet who lived most of her life in Indianapolis, where she was unofficially considered the state poet laureate. She was nationally published and was best known for "Paddle Your Own Canoe".

Edward Eggleston wrote religious, historical, and fictional works for both adult and juvenile audiences, frequently setting his pieces in Indiana. His most famous work was his debut novel, 1871's The Hoosier Schoolmaster, which was the first Hoosier best-seller.

Lew Wallace had a successful military and political career prior to penning 1880's Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which by 1900 became the best-selling American novel ever and was the second best-selling book in the United States behind the Bible.

James Whitcomb Riley rose to fame as a poet shortly after the publication of 1883's The Old Swimmin-hole, which was published pseudonymously and features "The Old Swimmin' Hole" and "When the Frost is on the Punkin". Riley became known as the "children's poet" and frequently wrote in the local dialect, capturing rural vernacular from the late 19th century. His "Little Orphant Annie" and "The Raggedy Man" inspired Johnny Gruelle's children's work in the 20th century, with a string of popular books.

Maurice Thompson was a polymath, who studied engineering, literature, and classics and began writing poems, articles on archery, and works about nature in the 1870s. He is specifically remembered for expressing the local color of Indiana writing and language. He also co-wrote with his brother Will Thompson.

Susan Wallace was a travel writer and poet who married Lew Wallace. Her husband illustrated two of her books and after his death, she completed his autobiography for publication.

Lawyer Charles Major spent years researching the 1898 work When Knighthood Was in Flower, which was popular enough to be on best-seller lists for three years.

Caroline Virginia Krout and Mary Hannah Krout wrote across several genres: short fiction, travelogue, and political agitation for women's suffrage. Mary also helped finalize the autobiography of Lew Wallace.

Anna Nicholas was primarily a journalist, working at The Indianapolis Journal and The Indianapolis Star, but she also wrote short stories and a history of Indianapolis' Crown Hill Cemetary in 1928.

Meredith Nicholson wrote both poetry and prose alongside his political career. Several of his novels became best-sellers, with The House of a Thousand Candles reaching fourth-best selling novel rank in 1906, The Port of Missing Men at third the following year, and A Hoosier Chronicle topping out at #5 in 1912.

George Ade wrote in the vernacular and parlayed his successful newspaper column that featured fables into comic and film adaptations. He also wrote comical plays, librettos, and film screenplays. Some of his best-remembered plays include The College Widow and Sho-Gun (both 1904).

Theodore Dreiser began writing as a journalist and transitioned into novels with 1900's masterpiece Sister Carrie. His work featured morally ambiguous and complex characters and Dreiser was a staunch advocate for social reform and was declared "a man of large originality, of profound feeling, and of unshakable courage" by H. L. Mencken. Furthermore, his brother Paul Dresser wrote “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away”, which became the second-bestselling song of the nineteenth century.

George Barr McCutcheon wrote a series of novels set in the fictional European state of Graustark, among the fifty or so books he wrote in the first 25 years of the 20th century. His works were very popular as film adaptations, including 1902's Brewster's Millions, which has been turned into a movie several times in the subsequent decades.

Lloyd C. Douglas began his writing career in 1905, but reached his greatest fame with 1929's Magnificent Obsession, his first novel being published when he was 50 years old. He continued writing fiction and religious works.

Alice Woods Ullman was born and educated in Indiana, entering the world of fine art and moving to New York at the tail end of the 19th century. She wrote a string of novels that were ground-breaking for focusing on women's perspectives before devoting herself to painting for the middle and later part of her life.

Gene Stratton-Porter had parallel careers as a young adult novelist with her Freckles (1904) and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) being particularly popular alongside her nature works, particularly focusing on birds and featuring her groundbreaking photography. In the 1910s, she was one of the most-read authors in the world, with her works translated into 20 languages and having over 50 million readers.

Born in Ohio, Kin Hubbard was a cartoonist and writer working at The Indianapolis News whose comic strip Abe Martin influenced such comedians as Groucho Marx and Kurt Vonnegut.

The Golden Age reached its apex with the work of Booth Tarkington, whose 1899 work The Gentleman from Indiana features a thorough exploration of the state and its people. Starting with his Penrod trilogy (1914's Penrod, 1916's Penrod and Sam, and 1929's Penrod Jashber), Tarkington had seven novels appear in the best-selling books of the year between 1914 and 1928 and received two Pulitzer Prizes for The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921), both of which were also adapted into popular films.

Will Cuppy was best known as a satirist, but also published thousands of book reviews and nature articles from the 1910s to 1950s.

• Portal:Bobbs-Merrill Company, an Indianapolis-based publisher that put out many of the most popular books of the early 20th century
• Paul Dresser, an Indiana-born songwriter who was one of the most famous composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, helping to establish Tin Pan Alley and the brother of Theodore Dreiser
• Jacob Piatt Dunn, an academic writing at this time
• Cole Porter, a Hoosier songwriter