Thelma Strabel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Thelma L. Strabel (19 December 1900 – 28 May 1959) was an American novelist who specialized in tales of the American South and sea adventures. She is best known for her novel Reap the Wild Wind, which was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and became a successful film. Strabel was born in Crown Point, Indiana on December 19, 1900, the first child of grocer John George Strabel and his wife Nannsie. (For unknown reasons, Strabel later claimed Pennsylvania as her birthplace.) She was the great-granddaughter of Abraham Lincoln's private secretary, General John Hall. She grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, but spent much of her youth also in southwestern Pennsylvania, her mother's native district. Strabel published her first short story in the children's section of a Pittsburgh newspaper. At 16, she worked as a census enumerator for the local census board. She graduated from the University of Illinois and later became a fashion reporter in Paris and an advertising copywriter for the Abraham & Straus department store. While convalescing from an illness in Switzerland, she began to write fiction as a vocation. Among her early works are Smart Woman (1933), Streamline Marriage (1937), For Richer -- Or For Poorer? (1938), and You Can't Escape Forever (1938). She wrote several novels set in exotic locales ranging from Caribbean islands to the jungles of Peru. Her best known story, Reap the Wild Wind (1940), is a romantic saga of the wrec…