Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut. In the early 1890s, she began publishing poems and stories, including “The Yellow Wall-Paper” in 1892, and became a lecturer on labor, feminism, reform, and suffrage. From 1909 to 1916 she wrote and edited the monthly magazine The Forerunner, in which she published the novels Herland and With Her in Ourland. With Jane Addams she founded the Woman’s Peace Party in 1915. After treatments for cancer failed, she took her own life in 1935.
Alfred Bendixen teaches at Princeton University and is the founder and Executive Director of the American Literature Association. He has edited or co-edited numerous volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing; A Companion to the American Short Story; A Companion to the American Novel; The Cambridge History of American Poetry; and The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture.