Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) was an American author of stories, poems, and verse for children. Although she produced a dozen volumes of short stories and as many novels, Freeman is remembered chiefly for her first two collections of stories, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), and the novel Pembroke (1894). In April 1926, Freeman became the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
