Louise Allender Stinetorf was an Earlham alumnus, Quaker, and well-known writer of books for children, mostly on religious themes. This collection reflects her literary career from about 1940 into the 1960s. Louise Allender was born in Randolph County, Indiana, February 4, 1900, and graduated from Ridgeville High School there. In 1919, she married Roscoe Stinetorf of Richmond, Indiana. After their marriage, both enrolled at Earlham. She received the A.B. degree in 1925, he in 1929. After leaving Earlham, while Roscoe Stinetorf was doing graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, she was on the staff of the American Friends Service Committee, focusing on peace work in the United States. Roscoe and Laouise Stinetorf were divorced in 1937. She retained the name Stinetorf for  professional and literary work. After her divorce, Louise Stinetorf spent two years as a missionary in Palestine, and taught for a time at the Baptist Missionary Training School in Chicago. She then married Dr. Henry L. Wilson of Topanga, California, who died in 1955. She afterwards moved to Celina, Ohio, where she lived until moving to Richmond, Indiana, about 1980. She died in Richmond, Nov. 22, 1992. Louise Stinetorf began contributing poetry to Quaker journals in the 1920s. She began writing prose in 1939. Her first books, Children of North Africa, appeared in 1943. Her best-known work was White Witch Doctor, a novel about a woman missionary physician in Africa that was a national best-seller and was made into a Hollywood movie. She was the author of a number of other books, along with about two hundred short stories and several hundred published poems. Her work focused on the adventures of missionaries, especially in Africa, aiming, in her words, "to point up the resemblance between the people with whom the missionaries work and the rest of mankind." Much of it was intended for a youthful audience.

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