Harriet Stark

Harriet Stark was an American author born in 1868 and died in 1944. She is chiefly known today for The Bacillus of Beauty: A Romance of To-day (1900), a novel that blends satire, moral warning, and speculative fiction.

Reference works now place her within the history of early science fiction, noting the book's unusual premise: a woman becomes infected with a beauty-enhancing bacillus, with tragic results. Because so little biographical material about Stark is widely documented, modern readers often encounter her through library archives, Project Gutenberg, and genre encyclopedias rather than through a large surviving body of work.

That air of mystery is part of her appeal. Even with only a small footprint in literary history, she stands out as a writer whose imaginative idea was memorable enough to keep her name alive more than a century later.