Harold Bell Wright rose from poverty to become "America's favorite author" for the first three decades of the 20th Century. Many of his 19 books were best sellers and were made into both silent films and later talkies. They include "The Winning of Barbara Worth," a novel set in the pioneering days of the reclamation project that turned the desert into the fertile Imperial Valley. Self-supporting from the age of 12, Harold Wright lived and wrote on a ranch he named "El Tecolote," a half mile west of this spot, from 1907 to 1915.