Thelma Strabel

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Thelma L. Strabel (1900–1959) was an American novelist who wrote popular stories about the American South and adventurous tales at sea. She is best known for Reap the Wild Wind, a novel that was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post and later made into a film.

She was born on December 19, 1900, in Crown Point, Indiana, to grocer John Strabel and his wife Nannsie. She later claimed Pennsylvania as her birthplace for unknown reasons. She was the great-granddaughter of John Hall, Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary. Strabel grew up mainly in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, but also spent much of her youth in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Strabel’s first published story appeared in a Pittsburgh newspaper’s children’s section. At 16 she worked as a census enumerator. She attended the University of Illinois and later worked as a fashion reporter in Paris and as an advertising copywriter for Abraham & Straus. While recovering from an illness in Switzerland, she began writing fiction full time.

Her early books include Smart Woman (1933), Streamline Marriage (1937), For Richer — Or For Poorer? (1938), and You Can’t Escape Forever (1938). Many of her stories are set in exotic locations, from Caribbean islands to the jungles of Peru.

Reap the Wild Wind (1940) is her best-known work. It tells a romance about wreckers near Key West, Florida. Cecil B. DeMille bought the novel and produced a popular film version in 1942, starring Paulette Goddard and John Wayne.

Strabel loved Key West so much that she bought a house there after selling the story to The Saturday Evening Post in 1940. The house at 400 South Street was once described by her as the southernmost house in the United States. It was later demolished to make way for a larger home.

Her other works include Storm to the South (1944), a romance set in Peru; You Were There, a Woman’s Home Companion serialized novel that was filmed as Undercurrent (1946); and Caribee (1957), about the Mount Pelée eruption of 1902.

Strabel married David P. Godwin, chief of fire control for the U.S. Forest Service. He died in a plane crash on June 13, 1947, and she never remarried. She died of cancer on May 28, 1959, in Washington, D.C., and was buried in Charleston, South Carolina.