Betsy-Tacy

The Betsy-Tacy books are a series of semi-autobiographical novels by American novelist and short-story writer Maud Hart Lovelace (1892-1980), which were originally published between 1940 and 1955 by the Thomas Y. Crowell Co.

The series follows the adventures of heroine Betsy Ray, who is based closely on the author, and her friends and family.

Although Lovelace intended to end the series after four books, her husband and daughter, who had found her high-school diaries, insisted that she use them to extend it through Betsy's high school career.

Lovelace described these books, for which she drew heavily on her diaries and high-school scrapbooks, as particularly true to life.

She wrote in 1964 that "the family life, customs, jokes, traditions are all true and the general pattern of the years is also accurate.

"[4] The first eight books are set in the fictional town of Deep Valley, Minnesota, based on Lovelace's childhood home of Mankato.

When HarperTrophy reprinted the Betsy-Tacy and Deep Valley series in 2000, they commissioned Michael Koelsch to illustrate new cover artworks for all thirteen books.

Lovelace utilized her own diaries and scrapbooks, contemporary materials such as magazines and catalogs, and correspondence with old friends and other past and present residents of Mankato who provided information to fill out her narratives.

There was no real-life Grosspapa Muller, Midge Gerlach's paternal grandfather having died before this 1907 visit, and much of the description of Christmas in a wealthy German household was taken from letters written by Kathleen Hart while she was studying in Germany.

[10] Another detail, the cast-iron dwarves with which Grosspapa decorated his lawn during the summer, may have come from a then-recent source, novelist Edna Ferber's 1940 memoir A Peculiar Treasure, which states that when Ferber worked as a reporter in Milwaukee during 1906-09, the city's wealthy families decorated their lawns with painted dwarves.

In the later books, as the characters enter high school, the girls expand their circles of friends without losing their special relationships.

In Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, the characters discover a neighborhood of Syrian immigrants and make friends with them.