Marah Ellis Ryan

Marah Ellis Ryan (1860–1934) was an American novelist, born in Butler County, Pennsylvania, who worked as an actress under the name Ellis Martin before turning to fiction. She wrote more than twenty novels, most of them set in the American West and Southwest, including Told in the Hills, That Girl Montana, The Flute of the Gods and Indian Love Letters, and was unusual among popular Western writers of her time for her sympathetic attention to Native American life, which she studied at first hand among the Hopi. Several of her books were filmed in the silent era. She spent her later years in California and died in Los Angeles.