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Subject: Excerpt Of History
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 18:11:51 EST
January 26
1831 Mary Mapes Dodge is born
On this day, children's writer Mary Mapes Dodge is born in New York City. At
the age of 20, she married a lawyer named William Dodge, and the couple had
two sons. Widowed at 27, Dodge began writing children's stories to support
herself. In 1864, she published a popular collection of tales, entitled
Irvington Stories, about a colonial American family. When her publisher asked her
for another book, she wrote Hans Brinker; or The Silver Skates, published in
1865. The story, set in the Netherlands, richly portrays Dutch life, although
the author herself never visited the country.
In 1873, Dodge was hired to edit a new children's magazine called St.
Nicholas, for which she set high literary standards. The magazine's high quality
attracted such contemporary writers as Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Robert
Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling. Dodge died in1907.
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