The Authors and Illustrators - Profiles

Maud Hart Lovelace

 Maud Hart Lovelace was born on April 25, 1892, in Mankato, Minnesota. Like Betsy, Maud followed her mother around the house at age five asking such questions as "How do you spell going down the street?" for the stories she had already begun to write. Soon she was writing poems and plays. When Maud was ten, a booklet of her poems was printed; and by age eighteen, she had sold her first short story, for ten dollars, to the Los Angeles Times
The Hart family left Mankato shortly after MaudUs high school graduation in 1910. They settled in Minneapolis, where Maud attended the University of Minnesota. In 1914, she sailed for Europe, and spent the months leading up to the outbreak of World War I in England. In 1917, she married Delos W. Lovelace, a newspaper reporter who later became a popular writer of short stories, and in 1926 her first novel was published. Five more historical novels followed. Maud wrote two of them in collaboration with her husband.
  The Lovelaces' daughter, Merian, was born in 1931. Maud would tell her daughter bedtime stories about her childhood in Minnesota, and it was these stories that gave the author the idea of writing the Betsy-Tacy books. Maud did not intend to write an entire series when Betsy-Tacy, the first book, was published in 1940. But readers asked for more stories, so Maud took Betsy through high school and beyond college to the "great world" and marriage.
  The Betsy-Tacy books were based closely upon Maud's own life. Almost all of Betsy's experiences were also Maud's. "Of course, I could make it all up, but in these Betsy-Tacy stories, I love to work from real incidents," Maud wrote.
 Maud Hart Lovelace died on March 11, 1980. But her legacy lives on in the beloved series she created and in her legion of fans, may of whom are members of the Betsy-Tacy Society, a national organization based in Mankato.

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