“I could make it all up, but in these Betsy-Tacy stories, I love to work from real incidents,” Maud wrote. The Betsy-Tacy books are based very closely on Maud’s own life. The final book in the series, Betsy’s Wedding, was published in 1955. So Maud took Betsy through high school and beyond college to the “great world” and marriage. Maud did not intend to write an entire series when Betsy-Tacy, the first book, was published in 1940, but readers asked for more. Maud would tell her daughter bedtime stories about her childhood, and it was these stories that gave her the idea of writing the Betsy-Tacy books. The Lovelaces’ daughter, Merian, was born in 1931. Lovelace, a newspaper reporter who later became a popular writer of short stories. The Hart family left Mankato shortly after Maud’s high school graduation in 1910 and settled in Minneapolis, where Maud attended the University of Minnesota. When Maud was 10, a booklet of her poems was printed by age 18, she had sold her first short story. Like Betsy Ray, Maud followed her mother around the house at age 5 asking questions (such as “How do you spell ‘going down the street’?”) for the stories she had already begun to write. Maud Hart Lovelace was born April 25, 1892, in Mankato, Minnesota.
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