Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was born in Randolph, Massachusetts and at fifteen moved with her family to Brattleboro, Vermont. In 1884, left without any immediate family, she returned to Randolph, where she lived for almost twenty years with her childhood friend Mary Wales. She began to write seriously in the 1970s, & in the early 1880s her work began to appear in such popular magazines as Harper's Bazaar and Harper's Monthly Magazine. At forty-nine Mary E. Wilkins married Charles Manning Freeman, a New Jersey physician, and moved to Metuchen. Thereafter she wrote under the name Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. In April 1926, she received the William Dean Howells Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; later that year she was among the 1st women to be elected to membership in the Natl. Inst. of Art & Letters. Alfred Bendixen is Professor of English at Texas A&M University, and founder and executive director of the American Literature Association. Much of his scholarship focuses on the recovery of unjustly neglected literary texts and the exploration of neglected genres. He is the author of numerous books on American poetry and literature, including recent titles such as A Companion to the American Novel (2012); A Companion to the American Short Story (2010); and The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing (2009), co-edited with Judith Hamera.
