Izola L. (Izola Louise) Forrester

Born Izola Louise Wallingford in Rhode Island in 1878, she became known as Izola Forrester after being adopted by Harriet and George Forrester following her mother's death. She began writing very young and built a career during the busy magazine and newspaper era of the early 1900s, when her journalism and fiction both found a wide audience.

Forrester wrote across several forms, including novels, stories for girls, and nonfiction drawn from her own working life. One of her best-known books is Four Years in the Underbrush: Adventures as a Working Woman in New York, which reflects her experience as a journalist and her interest in the realities of women's work and independence.

She also worked in screenwriting as film grew into a major new medium, showing how adaptable her storytelling was. She died in 1944, but her books remain part of the public-domain and library collections that preserve early 20th-century popular writing.