2018.12.22

It's Saturday.

I am going to read another book in my list, Betsy-Tacy.

Author’s Note

I cannot remember back to a year in which I did not consider myself to be a writer, and the younger I was the bigger the capital “W.” Back in Mankato I wrote stories in notebooks and illustrated them with pictures cut from magazines. When I was ten my father, I hope at not too great expense, had printed a booklet of my earliest rhymes. Soon after I started bombarding the magazines and sold my first story when I was eighteen.

For a long time now I have been happily absorbed in a succession of books for children, chiefly the Betsy-Tacy series. I began these by pure accident. Earlier, for many years, I wrote historical novels and there was a time when I would have told you I was unlikely ever to write anything else. The field delighted me. Especially, I loved the research involved.

I was well into my fourth novel when our daughter Merian was born—quite unexpectedly, because we had been married fourteen years. I finished that novel and wrote two more in collaboration with my husband. But I found myself less and less interested in inventing plots for adult readers. As Merian grew old enough to listen to stories, I loved to tell them to her and I found that most of them centered about my own happy childhood in Mankato. By the time she was seven, and my writer’s (now a small “w”) conscience was upbraiding me because I had not done a book for several years, I saw suddenly that I could make a book of the stories I was telling her.

The first of the Betsy-Tacy books resulted and ever since then I have written stories for children, most of them about Betsy who is, in some measure, myself. The Ray family is plainly the Hart family. I meet grandfathers now who tell me that they still remember my father’s onion sandwiches. It is a great joy to me to have that dear family between book covers.

I must make clear that these are books of fiction. Plots for them have been invented freely. But many—although not all—of the characters are based on real people.

This situation led me into a new kind of research. Letters began to fly. “Tacy,” “Tib,” “Carney,” and other close friends answered lists of questions from me about themselves and our doings when we were young. They drew diagrams of Mankato streets. (Mankato is the Deep Valley of the stories.) They sent old photographs of themselves and their relatives and their houses which Lois Lenski and Vera Neville enjoyed embodying in their delightful pictures. I dived into my own diaries and kodak books and memory books, while the New York Public Library—and later the Claremont libraries—helped out with old newspapers, old fashion magazines, collections of old popular songs, and Sears and Roebuck catalogues.

As our daughter grew up, so did Betsy, and there are now ten mainline Betsy-Tacy stories and three more in which Betsy appears. The letters from children which began with Betsy-Tacy flow into our mailbox and are a constant inducement to continue writing juvenile books.