Polly Oliver's Problem

It is an advantage for an author to have known many places and different sorts of people, though the most vivid impressions are commonly those received in childhood and youth. Mrs. Wiggin, as she is known in literature, was Kate Douglas Smith; she was born in Philadelphia, and spent her young womanhood in California, but when a very young child she removed to Hollis in the State of Maine, and since her maturity has usually made her summer home there; her earliest recollections thus belong to the place, and she draws inspiration for her character and scene painting very largely from this New England neighborhood. Hollis is a quiet, secluded place, a picturesque but almost deserted village--if the few houses so widely scattered can be termed a village--located among the undulating hills that lie along the lower reaches of the Saco River. Here she plans to do almost all her actual writing--the story itself is begun long before--and she resorts to the place with pent-up energy.