Gertrude Atherton

Atherton, Gertrude Franklin (Horn)

Gertrude Franklin (Horn) Atherton (ăth´ərtən), 1857–1948, American writer, b. San Francisco. She wrote a series of historical novels about California, which include The Californians (1898), Rezánov (1906), and The Ancestors (1907). Her most popular books are The Conqueror ...

Atherton, Gertrude Franklin (Horn)

Gertrude Franklin (Horn) Atherton (ăth´ərtən), 1857–1948, American writer, b. San Francisco. She wrote a series of historical novels about California, which include The Californians (1898), Rezánov (1906), and The Ancestors (1907). Her most popular books are The Conqueror (1902), which is a fictionalized biography of Alexander Hamilton, and the sensational novel Black Oxen (1923), concerning a woman who is rejuvenated by a glandular operation and based on Atherton's own experience of glandular therapy.

See her autobiography The Adventures of a Novelist (1932).