Barbara Newhall Follett, from Wikipedia
This weekend I happened upon Paul Collins’ essay “Vanishing Act,” about the writing prodigy Barbara Newhall Follett, whose The House Without Windows was published by Knopf in 1927 when the author was twelve. Our own Bertha Mahony loved the book, devoting three pages to it in the February 1927 Magazine. While Follett would go on to publish a few more books in her teens, her life became shadowed when her beloved father deserted Barbara and her mother; Barbara’s own marriage (at age nineteen) ended when she quarreled with her husband (she suspected he was having an affair) and (allegedly) walked out of their apartment in Brookline in 1939 and disappeared. Forever. Brrr!
According to Collins, Barbara’s last published work was in the Horn Book and I give it to you here, from the February 1933 issue of the Magazine.
About Roger Sutton
And how about Plato Chan, the 12-year-old who won a Caldecott Honor in 1944 for The Good Luck Horse?
Barbara was 25 when she vanished, not 19. To read more about her, check out my site at http://farksolia.org.
Stefan (Barbara’s nephew)