Novelist, travel writer, and essayist Helen Hunt Jackson (18301885) was one of the most successful authors and most passionate intellects of her day. Ralph Waldo Emerson also regarded her as one of America s greatest poets. Today Jackson is best remembered for Ramona, a romantic novel set in the rural Southern Californian Indian and Californio communities of her day. Ramona, continuously in print for over a century, has become a cultural icon, but Jackson s prolific career left us with much more, notably her achievements as a prose writer and her work as an early...