Grace MacGowan Cooke (1863–1944)

Grace MacGowan Cooke was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She was educated in public schools, supplemented by home-schooling by her father, an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War and longtime editor of The Chattanooga Times. She became a novelist and writer of short stories, mostly in collaboration with her older sister Alice MacGowan. Together they wrote more than 30 novels, about 100 short stories, and some poetry. Their genres included Westerns, mysteries, historical novels, and social novels. In 1908, the MacGowan sisters and their mother moved to Carmel, California, then a remote village by the Pacific with an artists' colony home to Mary Hunter Austin, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, George Sterling, Sinclair Lewis, Nora May French, and other influential figures. The two sisters stopped writing together for several years around 1910. Grace is probably best-remembered for her novel The Power and the Glory (1910), about the struggles of women working in the mills of Appalachia. Grace and Alice sisters resumed their collaboration in 1917, but their work grew less popular over the next 20 years. In 1935, they sold their house in Carmel and moved to Los Gatos, California.