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two hundred public words 19/30
Jul. 31st, 2010 09:54 pmI think I'll do two and two for the last bits of historical YAF authors. Wait, that would be two and three. Maybe I'll find another author I forgot, and then it will be two and two and two.
Anyway, this evening:
Patricia Beatty
Alberta Wilson Constant
So, 19th century American history has many YAF author-admirers, and Patricia Beatty (and sometimes her once-husband, John Beatty, a historical YAF fiction author in his own right, but not nearly as good as her) is one of my favorites. She concentrates on the South and the West (very few historical YAF authors celebrate the Midwest, though plenty laud New England...). She wrote in the 1960s and 1970s up through the late 1980s at least, from what I recall. Surprisingly, there is no Patricia Beatty page in Wikipedia. How is that possible? Does she have a web page of her own? Let me check. Nope. Plenty of her books are available through Amazon (I must see about that... of course, none of them are available in ebook form, sigh).
She made a living as a librarian for years, in Southern California, though she was born and grew up in Portland, OR. One of her books, Eight Mules from Monterey pays homage to the pioneering muleback librarians who, like a primitive Bookmobile, traveled around with books for homesteaders and miners. It's an excellent book. I wish I had it to read right now. She pays a lot of attention to humor... and it's a certain kind of non-ironic, non-sneering humor that used to go over well, up to the 1980s or so. Her books mostly have female heroines, but not all. Two of her best ones, both about the Civil War, from different perspectives, have male protagonists: Jayhawker, about a Kansas boy raised antislavery who gets caught up in border raiding, and Charley Skedaddle, about a New York drummer boy who is terrified by what war turns out to be, and who deserts to what was becoming West Virginia -- anyway, some mountainy Southern place where no one had slaves or gave a damn about the Civil War. They're both great books.
Her other two Civil War and just post-Civil War books have a female protagonist -- the same one -- who is a young girl who worked in a Georgian textile mill making uniform cloth... Yankees seize the mill and close it down, then ship all the workers North so they can't contribute any more to the war effort. This is based on true facts... anyway, they're both very thoughtful and nuanced books -- Turn Homeward, Hannalee and Be Ever Hopeful, Hannalee. I feel like there was a third one, but possibly that is just wishful thinking.
The last two books of hers I want to highlight (there are many, many, many more) are ones that may also be part of a longer running series of interrelated books, set on the Pacific Coast of Oregon in the 1890s -- these are The Nickel-Plated Beauty, about a bunch of ragtag fairly poor kids saving to buy their mother a cast-iron stove, and O The Red Rose Tree featuring those same kids and the making of a quilt with an old, old lady. I think there are more than just those two, but those two are the ones that come immediately to mind. Damn, now I want to own them ALL, immediately. She also wrote one called Lupita Mañana, which won the Jane Addams prize, but to be honest, I've stayed away from that one... I mean, maybe it's great. But I don't want to tarnish my fondness for Beatty if it isn't.
Alberta Wilson Constant almost deserves to be on the one-hit-wonder list, though she wrote three books. She ONLY wrote those three books, and they are a trilogy about a motherless family -- absent-minded professor father and two daughters -- which moves to Kansas where their father will profess and they will go to school, circa 1910 or therabouts. The books are enjoyable because there is a lot of detail about early automobiles, fashions, fads, trends, the Chatauqua, the Kansas state motto (ad astra per aspera), millinery, high school in the 1910s... that sort of thing. The high school stuff actually reminds me a great deal of Gene Stratton Porter's depiction of high school in The Girl of the Limberlost, written at the time (circa 1900 - 1910?), although I read that classic long after reading the Constant books. These are they:
Those Miller Girls
The Motoring Millers and
Does Anybody Care about Lou Emma Miller?
They are very expensive on Amazon... like, $30 to $40 apiece, sigh. For some reason, the final book was republished in paperback in 1988, and therefore is cheap, used. But not the first two.
Anyway, this evening:
Patricia Beatty
Alberta Wilson Constant
So, 19th century American history has many YAF author-admirers, and Patricia Beatty (and sometimes her once-husband, John Beatty, a historical YAF fiction author in his own right, but not nearly as good as her) is one of my favorites. She concentrates on the South and the West (very few historical YAF authors celebrate the Midwest, though plenty laud New England...). She wrote in the 1960s and 1970s up through the late 1980s at least, from what I recall. Surprisingly, there is no Patricia Beatty page in Wikipedia. How is that possible? Does she have a web page of her own? Let me check. Nope. Plenty of her books are available through Amazon (I must see about that... of course, none of them are available in ebook form, sigh).
She made a living as a librarian for years, in Southern California, though she was born and grew up in Portland, OR. One of her books, Eight Mules from Monterey pays homage to the pioneering muleback librarians who, like a primitive Bookmobile, traveled around with books for homesteaders and miners. It's an excellent book. I wish I had it to read right now. She pays a lot of attention to humor... and it's a certain kind of non-ironic, non-sneering humor that used to go over well, up to the 1980s or so. Her books mostly have female heroines, but not all. Two of her best ones, both about the Civil War, from different perspectives, have male protagonists: Jayhawker, about a Kansas boy raised antislavery who gets caught up in border raiding, and Charley Skedaddle, about a New York drummer boy who is terrified by what war turns out to be, and who deserts to what was becoming West Virginia -- anyway, some mountainy Southern place where no one had slaves or gave a damn about the Civil War. They're both great books.
Her other two Civil War and just post-Civil War books have a female protagonist -- the same one -- who is a young girl who worked in a Georgian textile mill making uniform cloth... Yankees seize the mill and close it down, then ship all the workers North so they can't contribute any more to the war effort. This is based on true facts... anyway, they're both very thoughtful and nuanced books -- Turn Homeward, Hannalee and Be Ever Hopeful, Hannalee. I feel like there was a third one, but possibly that is just wishful thinking.
The last two books of hers I want to highlight (there are many, many, many more) are ones that may also be part of a longer running series of interrelated books, set on the Pacific Coast of Oregon in the 1890s -- these are The Nickel-Plated Beauty, about a bunch of ragtag fairly poor kids saving to buy their mother a cast-iron stove, and O The Red Rose Tree featuring those same kids and the making of a quilt with an old, old lady. I think there are more than just those two, but those two are the ones that come immediately to mind. Damn, now I want to own them ALL, immediately. She also wrote one called Lupita Mañana, which won the Jane Addams prize, but to be honest, I've stayed away from that one... I mean, maybe it's great. But I don't want to tarnish my fondness for Beatty if it isn't.
Alberta Wilson Constant almost deserves to be on the one-hit-wonder list, though she wrote three books. She ONLY wrote those three books, and they are a trilogy about a motherless family -- absent-minded professor father and two daughters -- which moves to Kansas where their father will profess and they will go to school, circa 1910 or therabouts. The books are enjoyable because there is a lot of detail about early automobiles, fashions, fads, trends, the Chatauqua, the Kansas state motto (ad astra per aspera), millinery, high school in the 1910s... that sort of thing. The high school stuff actually reminds me a great deal of Gene Stratton Porter's depiction of high school in The Girl of the Limberlost, written at the time (circa 1900 - 1910?), although I read that classic long after reading the Constant books. These are they:
Those Miller Girls
The Motoring Millers and
Does Anybody Care about Lou Emma Miller?
They are very expensive on Amazon... like, $30 to $40 apiece, sigh. For some reason, the final book was republished in paperback in 1988, and therefore is cheap, used. But not the first two.