Atherton, Gertrude Franklin (Horn) [key], 1857–1948, American writer, b. San Francisco. She wrote a series of historical novels about California, which include The Californians (1898), Rezánov (1906), and The Ancestors (1907). Her most popular books are The Conqueror (1902), which is a fictionalized biography of Alexander Hamilton, and the sensational novel Black Oxen (1923), concerning a woman who is rejuvenated by a glandular operation and based on Atherton's own experience of glandular therapy.
See her autobiography The Adventures of a Novelist (1932).
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