Annie Fellows Johnston is primarily known for her Little Colonel stories, an enormously popular series which sold in the range of two million copies in her lifetime. Johnston was born in Evansville, Indiana. Following the death of her father, Albion Fellows, she grew up with her mother and two sisters on a farm in the Indiana countryside. In her autobiography, The Land of the Little Colonel (1929), she notes an early desire to become a writer, and in her late adolescence she had several poems published, one of which appeared in Harper's Weekly. She studied at the University of Iowa for one year and in 1888 married William Johnston, a widower with three children. After three years of marriage, William Johnston died. Faced with the prospect of raising three stepchildren, Johnston began to write seriously. She wrote several short stories for Youth's Companion; many of these were later gathered into...