author

Elizabeth Cannon Porter

b. 1885

Best known for an early 20th-century collection of historical stories inspired by the Book of Mormon, this little-known writer published under both Elizabeth Cannon Porter and Elizabeth Rachel Cannon. Her surviving record is sparse, which gives her work an extra air of rediscovery for modern readers.

1 Audiobook

The Cities of the Sun

The Cities of the Sun

by Elizabeth Cannon Porter

About the author

Elizabeth Cannon Porter was an American author associated with The Cities of the Sun (1910), a collection of stories set in ancient America and framed around incidents from the Book of Mormon. Library and public-domain records also connect her with the name Elizabeth Rachel Cannon, and Project Gutenberg lists McCrimmon as another associated name.

The best-documented works tied to her are The Cities of the Sun and Cortes the Conqueror. The first has remained visible through library catalogs, Internet Archive scans, and Project Gutenberg, which has helped keep her writing available to new readers even though biographical information about her is limited.

Because reliable personal details are hard to confirm from readily available sources, only a brief sketch is possible here. She appears to be one of those authors known more through the survival of her books than through a fully preserved public biography, but her work still offers a window into the religious and historical storytelling of its time.