Alice MacGowan (1858–1947)

Alice MacGowan was born in Perrysburg, Ohio, and grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She was educated in public schools, supplemented by home-schooling by her father, an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War and longtime editor of The Chattanooga Times. She became a novelist and writer of short stories, mostly in collaboration with her younger sister Grace MacGowan Cooke. Together they wrote more than 30 novels, about 100 short stories, and some poetry. Their genres included Westerns, mysteries, historical novels, and social novels. In 1908, the MacGowan sisters and their mother moved to Carmel, California, then a remote village by the Pacific with an artists' colony home to Mary Hunter Austin, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, George Sterling, Sinclair Lewis, Nora May French, and other influential figures. The two sisters stopped writing together for several years around 1910, and Alice co-authored five detective stories with Perry Newberry, former mayor of Carmel. Their 1922 novel The Million Dollar Suitcase was a bestseller. Alice also worked with Garnet Holme on a dramatization of her novel The Sword in the Mountains, entitled Chattanooga. Alice and Grace resumed their collaboration in 1917, but their work grew less popular over the next 20 years. In 1935, they sold their house in Carmel and moved to Los Gatos, California.