Harriet Stone Lothrop

Harriet was born in New Haven, Connecticut on June 22, 1833. She always yearned to write but her father objected to women writing for publication.  She began to publish stories and poems in magazines and newspapers using the pen name Margaret Sidney as not to offend her father.

In 1877 she penned “Polly Pepper’s Chicken Pie” for Awake, a Boston based children’s magazine. That was the beginning of the timeless Five Little Peppers series.  Five Little Peppers and How They Grew was first published in 1880.  Over the years she wrote eleven more volumes, the last being ,  Our Davie Pepper in 1916.

In 1881 she met and soon married Daniel Lothrop, the publisher of that Boston magazine,  Awake. They bought  “The Wayside” the former home of Nathaniel Hawthorne and before that, the Alcott family, in Concord Massachusetts.

She went on to write some thirty other books, including A Little Maid of Concord Town and A Little Maid of Boston, set in Revolutionary War times, and in 1895 she founded a national society, Children of the American Revolution.  During her lifetime over 2 million copies of her books were sold, many of which continue to be popular with children today.