author
Best known for a strange, cautionary tale about beauty and vanity, this little-known American writer left behind a memorable early work of speculative fiction. Her surviving record is sparse, which makes her one novel all the more curious and distinctive.
Born in Payson, Utah Territory, in 1868, Harriet Stark was an American author whose life is only lightly documented in readily available sources. She died in 1944.
She is chiefly remembered for The Bacillus of Beauty: A Romance of Today, first published in 1900. The novel uses a fantastical scientific premise to tell a moral story about appearance, character, and decline, and it has earned a small place in the history of early science fiction and speculative writing.
Although not much biographical detail is easy to confirm, Stark's work continues to attract interest from readers exploring overlooked women writers and unusual fin-de-siècle fiction.