More than a century after Opal Whiteley charged onto the Oregon scene, she remains the enigmatic figure in the state’s literary history. Most of her biographers (there are several) claim she was born in Washington and grew up in Oregon; she asserts she was the offspring of French royalty, taken away after her biological parents died, then adopted into an Oregon logging family.

Once Opal began school and started keeping a diary, she  became known as a young girl of unusual actions holding many odd ideas. After public schooling and a few months at the University of Oregon, Whiteley pushed ahead with her book-writing projects. Almost overnight, she became a nationally known author. And yet, within a year, she and her books disappeared from the scene. Strange, strange.

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The most dependable facts state that Whiteley was born in 1897 in Colton, Wash., and moved with her family to Oregon in 1902.  In the next few years, the Whiteleys moved to several logging sites, finally settling in Walden, near expanding Cottage Grove in the Willamette Valley. 

As a young girl, Opal fell in love with the natural world, spending long stretches in the woods, looking at animals and examining plants.  She also exhibited what later viewers called an early, minor form of schizophrenia. On one side, she was a wizard in the woods, on the other a weird forest wanderer.

But Opal moved on.  She finished high school, became an active participant and speaker with the Christian Endeavor youth ministry, and made presentations on natural history.  Running out of money, she went south to California, hoping to land work with movies.  When that dream never materialized, she decided to travel east to see about publishing a book. 

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Hoping to find an established publisher interested in a book she had put out in a few copies, Whiteley contacted Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Sedgwick was not taken with her book, which she self-published as The Fairyland Around Us in 1918. But impressed with Whiteley’s way with words, he asked her if she had ever written a diary.  It was a life-changing question. Opal had begun writing a diary as a 6-year-old, but her sister had torn it up, nearly destroying it.  The diary remains had been kept in a box. 

Sedgwick and Whiteley agreed she should reassemble the diary and have it considered for book publication.  For the next nine months, Whiteley worked endlessly to recompose her earlier writings.  When finished and presented, the work quickly caught Sedgwick, and he published several segments of the diary in The Atlantic Monthly in 1920.  These sections and the rest of the diary were published later that year as The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart.

The magazine serials and the published book captured American readers, with the book immediately becoming a best seller. The child prodigy from the Oregon outback had exploded onto the national literary scene.

The approach and the contents of The Story of Opal snared American readers. Picture an erudite 6- or 7-year-old sharing her childhood life and telling stories of a nature alive to her sensibilities. These were the compelling ingredients of Whiteley’s memoir.

The book overflows with her experiences at home and in nature.  Her unusual actions at home led to frequent conflicts with “Mamma,” including spankings and set-asides under the bed. The ties to her father and her siblings were less tense. Frequently, while at home, Opal was distant in her thinking.  Such conflicts between a near-at-hand presence and faraway ponderings eventually led to mental and psychological challenges for Whiteley.

Even more unusual are Opal’s revealing ties to nature and animals. She loves and speaks to trees, relishes walks along creeks, and loses herself in natural settings time after time.  Naming many animals after famous writers and leaders, she also exhibits love for rats, dogs, pigs, horses, and cows. Few — if any — first- or second-graders adored nature as much as Opal.

The wording in The Story of Opal entices readers.  She loves unusual expressions: “thinks thinks,” “feels feels,” “wants wants,” and “looks for looks.” Opal’s phrases, descriptions, spellings, and thoughts attract and maintain attention.

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In all ways, Whiteley’s book was unusual — in its organization, wording, descriptions, and content.  Read carefully, the book repeatedly gives abundant reasons for its explosion onto the American literary scene in 1920.

Just as quickly, however, the book disappeared and fell out of print. Some thought it the fraudulent work of Whiteley’s early adult years, others viewed it as overflowing with huge lies, and still others were convinced that Whiteley was — in nearly all ways — not a truth-teller about herself or her surroundings,

The overnight fall of The Story of Opal greatly disturbed the new author. Losing her equilibrium, she undertook several extensive trips, including to India and Europe. Within a few years, she seemed at a loss to where her life should go. Her mind lost its balance. In 1948, after crumbling, near-disastrous years in England, she was committed to Napsbury Hospital north of London. For more than 40 years, she remained in serious psychological care before dying in 1992.  She was 95.

Opal Whiteley should be remembered as a talented young author who wrote an unusual book while still in grade school. That book, The Story of Opal, deserves ongoing attention as one of the remarkable works in all of Oregon literature.