1 Paste your biographical sketch here (maximum 500 words)
Stewart Edward White, an American male, was born March 12, 1873 at Grand Rapids Michigan. He was born to Thomas Stewart White, a successful lumberman, and Mary Eliza (Daniell) White. Through his father's side of the family, Stewart was a descendant of John White, who came to the American colonies in 1632 and later became known as the founder of Cambridge Massachusetts, the place where he first settled. His mother hailed from Hoosick Falls, New York. During the early part of his childhood, Stewart and his father traveled from one lumber town to the next all throughout northern Michigan. In his early teen years, between ages 12 and 16, he and his father moved out west to the lumber ranches of California. It was this early exposure to the outdoors life that later became the basis for some of his writing. At the age of sixteen, he returned to Grand Rapids and enrolled in Central High School. Two years later, Stewart graduated from high school and headed for the woods of Michigan. Here, from 1888-1891 he wrote between 30 and 40 articles on birds, which became his first published writings. Following his three year excursion in the woods, he enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1891. He obtained a Ph.B degree from the University of Michigan in 1895. For the next six months following college, Stewart was employed at a packing house in Grand Rapids and then became part of the gold rush to the Black Hills of South Dakota. After quickly running out of money, he decided to enroll at Columbia Law School. It was at Columbia where his literary career got its first start. An English professor, Brander Matthews, convinced Stewart to attempt to sell a short story he had written in class entitled A Man and His Dog. In 1897-1898 at the age of 24 or 25, the s tory was purchased for $15.00 by Short Stories, making this his first paid piece of literature. Following his stay at Columbia, he worked briefly for a Chicago book-selling store called A.C. McClurg but soon returned to the forests of Michigan and became a umberjack. During this time he not only continued to gather material for later novels, but also wrote his first two full length novels The Westerners (1901) and The Claim Jumpers (1901). With the publication of The Blazed Trails in 1902, Stewart was ackn owledged as a member of the "red blood school of writers", which included such authors as Jack London and Bret Harte. During the next four decades, he produced nearly thirty pieces of literature, more than fifty volumes in his lifetime, which included Th e Westerners (1901) The Forest (1903), The Mountains (1904), The Riverman (1908), Gold (1913), and one of his most famous novels, The Silent Places (1904). Stewart considers The Silent Places the greatest example of "literary atmosphere" he knows. In 19 13 he traveled to Africa, and was later named a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in London, based on his extensive map work of the German East African jungles. He married his wife, Elizabeth Calvert Grant, on April 28, 1904. They never had childre n. In the latter stages of his career, Stewart wrote on parapsychology and psychical. Some of his papers are located at the University of Michigan Library, University of Oregon Library, University of California Berkley Library, and the Syracuse Universi ty Library. He died September 18, 1946 following an operation at the University of California Hospital,in San Fransico where he resided,at age 73.