Eleanor H. Porter wrote mainly children's literature, adventure stories, and romance fiction. Her most famous novel is "Pollyanna" (1913), followed by a sequel, "Pollyanna Grows Up" (1915). Her adult novels include "The Turn of the Tide" (1908), "The Road to Understanding" (1917), "Oh Money! Money!" (1918), "Dawn" (1919), "Keith's Dark Tower" (1919), "Mary Marie" (1920) and "Sister Sue" (1921); her short-story collections include "Across the Years" (c. 1919), "Money, Love and Kate" (1923), and "Little Pardner" (1926). Porter achieved considerable commercial success: "Pollyanna" ranked eighth among best-selling novels in the United States during 1913, second during 1914, and fourth during 1915 (with 47
Ship of Fools (Porter novel) mostly written between 1922 and 1940. She began work on the novel in 1940, intending it initially to be a novella (or "short novel", as Porter would put it, as she famously wrote about how she detested the word "novella"). The story was based on a journal she kept in 1931 during a sea voyage from Veracruz, Mexico, on her way to study in Bremerhaven, Germany, on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the characters in the novel were based on real people she met during the trip. The title was taken from "Das Narrenschiff" ("The Fool-Ship"), a 15th-century German poem by