Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) was born in South Berwick, Maine, the daughter of a small-town country doctor. When she was young, she often traveled with her father when he made house calls to his patients in the country. Inspired by the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, she published her first short story as a teenager in the Atlantic Monthly, a well-known national magazine. In the fiction she wrote when she grew older, she described and celebrated rural Maine and its people. Her novel A Country Doctor tells of a young woman from New England who takes the then unheard-of step of refusing to marry to pursue a career in medicine. Jewett is best known for her collections of short stories, including Deephaven (1877), A White Heron (1886), The King of Folly Island (1888), A Native of Winby (1893), and her finest work, The County of the Pointed Firs (1896).