Pollyanna is a sentimental tale by Eleanor Hodgman Porter. Published in 1913, Pollyanna is a tale of an improbable heroine, a young girl whose “glad game” of always looking for and finding the bright side of things somehow restores hope to the hopeless. This is an 11-year-old orphan who comes to live under the care of her dour spinster aunt Polly in a Vermont town. The book gained enormous popularity and had reportedly sold over a million copies. The popularity was credited to the American readers' eagerness for reassurance that rural virtues and cheerful optimism still existed. Many like this book for Porter's skill in blending dashes of social conscience and ironic distance into the sentimentalism.
During the World War I years, Pollyanna took America by storm. It struck a nerve and was an immediate hit with children as well as adults, and its popularity endured throughout those years. The book inspired numerous related books and products and was translated into several foreign languages. It was first adapted to stage in 1916.