Ellen White's published output ran to more than forty books and several thousand periodical articles over seventy years, and her grandson later called her the most translated woman author, of any kind, in the history of literature. Steps to Christ (1892) and The Desire of Ages (1898) reached readers well beyond Adventism, and The Great Controversy, first published in 1888 and revised in 1911, laid out the sweeping account of a cosmic conflict between good and evil that still shapes Adventist preaching.
A vision in June 1863 turned her attention to health, and from it grew a sustained call for vegetarian diet, temperance and rest that the church took seriously enough to build institutions around: the Battle Creek Sanitarium, later Loma Linda, now a university medical center, and Avondale College in New South Wales, which she helped establish during her years in Australia. The Seventh-day Adventist Church's own Fundamental Belief 18 states that her writings continue to speak with prophetic authority, offering guidance subordinate only to the Bible itself.
That authority has not gone unexamined. Historians, including some within the church, have documented substantial unattributed borrowing in her books from other religious writers of her time, a body of evidence the church has generally read as compilation under inspiration and outside scholars have generally read as evidence against a strictly original prophetic voice. The underlying facts of what she read and repeated are not seriously disputed; what they mean for her claim to prophetic authorship remains a live and unresolved argument.