Pearl Doles Bell ( April 2, 1883 – March 11, 1968 ) was an American novelist, film scenarist, radio script writer, and editor. During her career, she published 8 novels and had numerous stories adapted into silent films. At age 12 she began publishing poems in the St. Joseph newspaper. Her poems were soon reprinted in newspapers around the country. Around the same time she went on stage as an elocutionist, touring the country.

Doles married George Humphrey Bell, a former Chicago businessman, on March 9, 1910 in Chicago. The Bells lived in Brooklyn but traveled once a year to Florida on a yacht named “The Bells”, where Pearl honed her skills as “an expert swimmer, a crack shot with a rifle, an expert canoeist, and a handy hiker”. In 1913, she made the front page of the New York Times for her “daring feat” of diving with the sharks in Key West.

Bell incorporated her knowledge of boats and sailing into her first novel, Glory Gray, Love Pirate, published in 1914. She also contributed an illustration for the frontispiece.

To research her third novel, Her Elephant Man: A Story of the Sawdust Ring, Bell traveled for six weeks with the Ringling Brothers Circus. Pearl sold the film rights to the Fox Film Corporation and the film starred Shirley Mason.

NOVELS

Gloria Gray, Love Pirate, 1914.
His Harvest, 1915.
Her Elephant Man: A story of the Sawdust Ring, 1919.
The Autocrat, 1922.
Sandra, 1924.
The Love Link, 1925.
Slaves of Destiny, 1926.
Woman on Margin, 1928.
The First Lady, 1932.

FILMOGRAPHY

Her Elephant Man, 1920.
Love’s Harvest, 1920.
Wing Toy, 1921.
For Another Woman, 1924.
Sandra, adapted from the novel.

Pearl Doles Bell later married Havana distiller and art collector Gilbert E. Rubens in 1927 in New York.