Betty MacDonald

Betty Bard MacDonald (born March 26, 1907 in Boulder , Colorado , † February 7, 1958 in Seattle , Washington ) was an American writer. Her best-known works include The Egg and Me and the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle Stories.

Life

The author's maiden name is Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard . Her father Darsie Bard was a mining engineer , her mother Elsie, called Sydney, was a housewife. She had four siblings: older sister Mary and younger siblings Cleve, Dede, and Alison. The parents met in Boston : Darsie Bard studied at Harvard , Elsie (née Sanderson) trained as an illustrator at the Eric Pape School in Boston. They married and moved to Butte, Montana , in 1903 , where their first child, Mary, was born on November 21, 1904. Because of his work, Darsie Bard traveled a lot in the western United States. The Bards lived briefly in Nevada and in 1907 in Boulder, Colorado. Betty Bard was born there.

The family then spent a few months in Mexico, where Darsie Bard had an assignment. In the same year the family moved to the small town of Placerville, Idaho . Cleve Bard was born there on November 29, 1908. In 1910, Darsie Bard received a chair in geology and mineralogy at the Montana State School of Mines in Butte. Betty Bard spent most of her childhood in Butte. The fourth child of the Bards, Dorothea Darsie, called Dede, was born here on January 16, 1915. In the fall of 1916, Darsie Bard gave up teaching in Butte and the family moved to Seattle. There Darsie Bard went into business for herself and founded a company with a partner, Bard & Johnson, consulting geological engineers. Mary and Betty attended a private school, St Nicholas School.

In January 1920, Darsie Bard suddenly died of pneumonia at the age of 41 . Sydney Bard was then pregnant with Alison, who was born on June 25, 1920. The expenses now had to be reduced, Betty moved to Lincoln High School and later to Roosevelt High School, which she graduated in 1924. She enrolled at the University of Washington , mainly for drawing and design courses.

In 1925, Sydney Bard bought a farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Chimacum , with a herd of cows, chickens, horses, pigs and goats, and Cleve ran this farm with the help of the family. There Betty Bard met a young insurance salesman, Robert Heskett, and married him on July 10, 1927. On February 23, 1928, she had a daughter, Anne Elizabeth Heskett. Meanwhile, the Bard family had both had to sell their town house and lost the farm, which was foreclosed in January 1928. As a result, the Hesketts decided to use Betty's newly freed share of her father's inheritance to buy land and a farmhouse in the Chimacum Valley and raise poultry there. In 1930, both this company and the marriage had failed. Betty, who gave birth to their second daughter, Joan Dorothy Heskett, on July 14, 1929, left her husband with their two young children and filed for divorce on May 27, 1930. Apparently, however, there had been an understanding between Betty and Robert Heskett for a time, because a second divorce petition from July 1931 has been handed down, which ultimately led to the dissolution of the marriage.

Betty resumed her maiden name Bard and lived in Seattle with her mother and her sisters and daughters. At first she worked in a number of short-term jobs until she took up a position in the National Recovery Administration in 1934 , the bureaucracy created in connection with the New Deal . She worked there temporarily as a state mediator in labor disputes ("labor adjuster"). In 1936 she worked for a division of the United States Department of the Treasury . She had to interrupt these activities when she was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1938 . After a nine-month rest cure at the Sanatorium Firland, the tuberculosis facility of the City of Seattle, she was released in 1939 as cured. Then she found a job with the National Youth Administration , another New Deal agency where she is a senior position in the public relations ( "publicity") occupied.

In 1942 she married Donald Chauncy MacDonald, who was then a quality inspector at Boeing , and moved with him and their two children to Vashon Island . Both Donald and Betty MacDonald commuted to work daily by ferry to Seattle while the children went to school on the island. On Vashon Island, Betty MacDonald began to write her book The Egg and I , which was published in 1945 by JB Lippincott & Co. and became a world bestseller. Over a million copies were sold in the first year. Further books followed: 1948 The Plague and I , 1950 Anybody can do anything , 1955 Onions in the Stew , plus children's books about Mrs Piggle-Wiggle and the youth book Nancy and Plum . The Egg and I was in 1947 with Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray filmed . In the wake of the film, however, there was also an insulting process: Several people who were portrayed in the book under different names sued the author and the book publisher in 1951. The lawsuit was dismissed. MacDonald stated that her fictional characters were poetic inventions; this strategy worked.

With the proceeds from the books, Betty and Donald MacDonald bought a ranch in Carmel Valley in 1952 . At first the author commuted to Seattle more often, from 1955 she lived permanently in Carmel. In 1956 she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, of which she died in Seattle in 1958.

plant

Autobiographical books

The author's best-known works are autobiographical humorous books, always told in first-person form. The Egg and I , the first and most successful of these works, is about life with her first husband on a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula. The theme of The Plague and I (literally: the plague and me; "white plague", the white plague, was called tuberculosis in America) is the tuberculosis treatment of the author in the Sanatorium Firland. Anybody can do anything describes the experiences of Mary and Betty Bard while they were looking for a job during the Great Depression . With Onions in the Stew (about: Onions in the Stew) is about the experiences of a working mother with her teenage daughters on Vashon Iceland. The title comes from a poem by Charles Divine (1889–1950), At the Lavender Lantern , and characterizes a once familiar place where "hearts beat high and money was tight and there were onions in a stew" ("where hearts were high and fortunes low, and onions in the stew "). The publication Who, me? Was launched in 1959 after the author's death . contained only a chronologically ordered compilation of excerpts from the four autobiographical books published during her lifetime. It was put together by the editor Tay Hohoff so that the heirs did not have to repay the advance payment already made for a fifth book from the Piggle Wiggle series.

The Egg and I was initially published in parts in sequels in The Atlantic Monthly (spread over June, July and August 1945), in book form it came on the market in October 1945. One of the success factors of this novel were the hillbillies described there , the American backwoodsmen from the country, especially the Kettle family with their 15 children. Following the success of the book and the film based on the novel, Universal Pictures pushed a series of nine other Ma-and-Pa-Kettle films from 1949 to 1957 that exposed these characters. The role of Ma Kettle was played by Marjorie Main , who was nominated for an Oscar in 1947 .

Children's books

Nancy and Plum is about two orphaned sisters who grow up in a children's home. The manager of the home, Mrs. Monday, is stingy, brutal and withholds mail and gifts from her only relative. The children manage to escape from the home and make contact with their uncle. You are welcomed by a couple who run a farm nearby and it comes to a happy ending .

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's books contain short stories for children. The heroine is described as a little woman with magical abilities who lives in an upside down house and is the friend of all children.

List of published works and German translations

On the first level, the list contains the first editions of the books in the original English. We have indented preprints in magazines, editions with significant changes, mainly affecting the illustrator, and the first editions of the German translations. In particular, the Piggle Wiggle books published in 1957 with Hilary Knight's illustrations, as well as two different translations by Nancy and Plum , where even the titles differ, are given here.

• The Egg and I . Lippincott, Philadelphia 1945
  • Excerpts reprinted in The Atlantic Monthly , June to August 1945
  • The egg and me . Translation: Renate Hertenstein. Alpha Verlag, Bern 1947
• Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle . Illustrations: Richard Bennett. Lippincott, Philadelphia 1947
  • Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle . Illustrations: Hilary Knight. Lippincott, Philadelphia 1957
  • Miss Poodle-Doodle's miracle cures . Translation: Liselotte Julius. Scherz, Bern 1963
• The Plague and I . Lippincott, Philadelphia 1948
  • Excerpts reprinted in Good Housekeeping , August to October 1948
  • Once the sun is shining again. Translation: Melanie Steinmetz. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1952
• Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic . Illustrations: Kurt Wiese . Lippincott, Philadelphia 1949
  • Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic. Illustrations: Hilary Knight. Lippincott, Philadelphia 1957
• Anybody Can Do Anything . Lippincott, Philadelphia 1950.
  • Excerpts preprinted under the title It all happened to me in the Saturday Evening Post , June to September 1950
  • Betty can do anything . Translation: Renate Hertenstein. Scherz, Bern 1951
• Nancy and Plum . Illustrations: Hildegarde Hopkins. Lippincott, Philadelphia 1952
  • Hand in hand after the sun. Translation: Georg Goyert . Illustrations: Erika Meier-Albert. The buoy, Stuttgart 1953
  • Alice and Mella . Translation: Sigrid Ruschmeier. Illustrations: Almud Kunert. Aladin, Hamburg 2013
• Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Farm . Illustrations: Maurice Sendak . Lippincott, Philadelphia 1954
• Onions in the Stew . Lippincott, Philadelphia 1955
  • The island and me . Translation: Elisabeth Schnack . Scherz, Bern 1956
• Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle . Illustrations: Hilary Knight. Lippincott, Philadelphia 1957
• Who me? The autobiography of Betty MacDonald . Lippincott, Philadelphia 1959

reception

Betty MacDonald in other autobiographies

The autobiographical report by Monica Sone (born as Kazuko Itoi) , published in 1953, about her childhood, youth and internment as a Japanese American , Nisei Daughter , also tells of her friendship with Betty MacDonald, who appears in the book as "Chris". Kazuko Itoi was at the same time as Betty Bard at the Firland Tuberculosis Clinic, where the two met. In Betty MacDonald's book The Plague and I she is called "Kimi Sanbo".

Unlike Sone's book, Blanche Caffiere's Much Laughter, A Few Tears (1992) consistently refers to shared experiences with Betty MacDonald, as can be seen from the subtitle Memoirs of a Woman's Friendship with Betty MacDonald and Her Family . These are essentially anecdotes from the friendship between the two women.

The artist William Cumming dedicated a chapter of his memorabilia Sketchbook: A Memoir of the 1930s and the Northwest School (1984) to Betty MacDonald . He knew the author from the National Youth Administration, where she had found him a job during her time as public relations director.

Reception in the Czech Republic

In 2008 the literary scholar Jiří Trávníček carried out the most extensive survey on the subject of "Readers and Reading" in the Czech Republic to date, in cooperation with the National Library of the Czech Republic and the Institute for Czech Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic . The evaluation he made in his book Čteme? published, brought as a result that MacDonalds Factory The Egg and I was the most popular book in the Czech Republic at this time, even before The Good Soldier Schweik , Harry Potter and the grandmother of Bozena Nemcova . This result was confirmed in follow-up surveys. A research project by Trávníček (running until 2019) examines the reasons for MacDonald's popularity among the Czech readership.

literature

• Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald. The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I . University of Washington Press, Seattle and London 2016
• Kathy D. Hadley: MacDonald, Betty. In: The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States . Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford 1995, p. 535

Web links

• Literature by and about Betty MacDonald in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature and other media by and about Betty MacDonald in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic
• Mildred Andrews: MacDonald, Betty (1907-1958) . HistoryLink.org Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, HistoryLink.org Essay 156, April 11, 1998; last revised on October 17, 2014

Individual evidence

1. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald. University of Washington Press, Seattle and London 2016, p. 9 f. In contemporary representations, March 26, 1908 was given for unclear reasons; however, the baptism date May 12, 1907, and the fact that Sydney Bard was already pregnant with Cleve in March 1908, show, according to Becker, that this is impossible.
2. ↑ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , pp. 3-9.
3. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , pp. 10-20.
4. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , pp. 21-30.
5. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , pp. 34-48.
6. ↑ Barbara Levy: Ladies Laughing, Gordon & Breach, Philadelphia 1997, p. 27.
7. ^ Paula Becker: Betty MacDonald. Biography. March 25, 2016. Online ; Mildred Andrews: MacDonald, Betty (1907-1958). 1998. Corrected in 2002, expanded and revised by Paula Becker in 2004, 2007 and 2014. Online ; Barbara Levy: Ladies Laughing, Gordon & Breach, Philadelphia 1997, p. 27.
8. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 65.
9. ^ Paula Becker: Betty MacDonald. Biography. March 25, 2016. Online ; and Mildred Andrews: MacDonald, Betty (1907-1958). 1998. Corrected in 2002, expanded and revised by Paula Becker in 2004, 2007 and 2014. Online .
10. ^ Paula Becker: Libel trial against Betty MacDonald of Egg and I fame opens in Seattle on February 5, 1951. 2007, revised 2014. Online ; and Beth Kraig: Betty and the Bishops: Was The Egg and I Libelous? Columbia Magazine, Spring 1998, Vol. 12, No. 1, online .
11. ^ Paula Becker: Betty MacDonald. Biography. March 25, 2016. Online ; and Mildred Andrews: MacDonald, Betty (1907-1958). 1998. Corrected in 2002, expanded and revised by Paula Becker in 2004, 2007 and 2014. Online .
12. ↑ Barbara Levy: Ladies Laughing . Gordon & Breach, Philadelphia 1997, p. 26; Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 161.
13. ^ Paula Becker: Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I is published on October 3, 1945. Online .
14. ↑ Co Čech, to knihomil: podle průzkumu na Češi jedni for největších čtenářů , report in iDNES of 23 December 2008, online at: zpravy.idnes.cz / ...
15. ↑ Betty MacDonaldová jako český čtenářský fenomén ("Betty MacDonald as a Czech reader phenomenon"), project no . GA17-06666S, online .