Born on an impoverished Wisconsin farm, Ella Wheeler Wilcox hungered for fame and fortune. As a young farm girl, she caught the attention of East Coast editors. Her life became a tapestry of color and melodrama, an epic of American rags to riches. She scandalized her generation with verse that seemed too risqué for a puritanical nation, but her own married life was the model of Christian propriety.
This fictionalized account chronicles her controversial life, not only the glittering heights of international celebrity, but also the nagging fears that tempered her vast and cherished success.
Other notable works by Wilcox were a poem marking the death of Queen Victoria and a plea to World War I American soldiers fighting in Europe to "come back clean, boys" to their wives and families and avoid venereal disease.
