As the New Year dawns, the Ware children'Holland, Jack, Joyce, Mary, and Norman'find themselves on a train to a boarding camp for their ill mother, Mrs. Ware, in Maricopa, Arizona. ' Soon their friend Lloyd Sherman, the Little Colonel, joins them in their cozy wigwam home in the desert. ' After a harrowing experience being lost in the desert and her first experience of romance with the Ware family's friend Phil Tremont, the Little Colonel returns to Dixie a braver and stronger young woman in excited anticipation of her experiences still to come.
Annie Fellows Johnstonís life exemplifies success and perseverance: she wrote over forty books (one was even made into a major motion picture) during a time period when it was not customary for women to be so successful, she was a devoted wife to a husband who died only a few years after their marriage, and she was a stepmother to three children, for whom she continued to care after the death of their father. Mrs. Johnston is most famous for her thirteen-book Little Colonel Series . In 1935, Twentieth Century Fox released The Little Colonel based on the first book in the series, The Little Colonel . The movie starred Shirley Temple and Lionel Barrymore. Born on a farm in a small town in Indiana on May 15, 1863, Annie sharpened her writing skills as a young girl. Her father, a minister, died when she was two but left an exstensive collection of reading material, and her mother, an advocate for womenís education, encouraged Annie to teach and go to college. She attended the University of Iowa for a year, taught for three years, worked as a private secretary, and traveled through New England and Europe before she married a cousin, who encouraged her to write, and became a mother to his three young children. Mrs. Johnstonís unique writing style fictionalized real people and experiences. On a visit to Pewee Valley, Kentucky, in 1895, Mrs. Johnston met little Hattie Cochran,
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