The Harvester
The Harvester is a lush, intoxicating romance set in the wild wetlands of northern Indiana, where a young man named David Langstrom makes his living gathering medicinal herbs from the untamed forest. Alone in his cabin by the swamp, he lives wholly in tune with the seasons, until a woman named Ruth arrives and upends his solitary world. What unfolds is both a passionate love story and a celebration of a way of life now almost entirely lost: one man's deep, daily intimacy with the land, the plants, and the creatures around him. Stratton-Porter was a groundbreaking naturalist, and her detailed, almost reverent observations of the natural world elevate this beyond simple romance into something rarer, a book that makes you smell the marsh mud and hear the wind through the cattails. Originally published in 1911 and adapted into a silent film, The Harvester captures a moment in American history when the wild places were still close enough to touch. For readers who crave quiet books with beating hearts, who want to disappear into another era and fall in love with both a person and a place.
Editions
X-Ray
“If anyone had asked him that morning concerning his idea of Heaven, he never would have dreamed of describing a place of gold-paved streets, crystal pillars, jewelled gates, and thrones of ivory. These things were beyond the man's comprehension and he would not have admired or felt at home in such magnificence if it had been materialized for him. He would have told you that a floor of last year's brown leaves, studded with myriad flower faces, big, bark-encased pillars of a thousand years, jewels on every bush, shrub, and tree, and tilting thrones on which gaudy birds almost burst themselves to voice the joy of life, while their bright-eyed little mates peered questioningly at him over nest rims”
— Gene Stratton-Porter
“From an outside viewpoint it seems as if I had almost all a man could ask in reason. But when was a strong man in the grip of love ever reasonable? I think the Almighty took a pretty grave responsibility when He made men as He did. If I had been He, and understood the forces I was handling, I would have been too big a coward to do it.””
— Gene Stratton-Porter
“The next time any of you are called upon to address a body of men tell them to learn for themselves and to teach their sons, and to hold them at the critical hour, even by sweat and blood, to a clean life; for in this way only can feeble-minded homes, almshouses, and the scarlet woman be abolished. In this way only can men arise to full physical and mental force, and become the fathers of a race to whom the struggle for clean manhood will not be the battle it is with us.””
— Gene Stratton-Porter
“From there on, for a few years, she held me, not because I was man enough to stand, but because she was woman enough to support me””
— Gene Stratton-Porter
“Knowing things will not harm you. Doing them is a different matter. What you know will be a protection. What you do ruins - if it is wrong.””
— Gene Stratton-Porter
