Born in South Berwick, Maine in 1849, Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett learned about coastal life in New England while a child, by accompanying her doctor father on his rounds. When she began submitting fiction in 1867, using the pseudonyms A. D. Eliot, Alice Eliot, and Sarah C. Sweet, her chosen topic was often the life and people of her native, rural Maine. Recognized as a major American writer of regional fiction, her masterwork is her novel The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), a loosely structured story of the people of Dunnet Landing, Me. Sarah Jewett stopped writing in 1902, after a fall left her with severe head injuries, but she continued to advise her protege, Willa Cather. She died… of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1909.