Betty MacDonald

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Betty MacDonald (1908–1958), born Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard, was an American author who specialized in humorous autobiography, but who is now perhaps best known for the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series of children's books. She is associated with the Pacific Northwest, especially Washington state.

MacDonald was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1908. Her family moved from Butte, Montana, to the north slope of Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood in 1918, moving to the Laurelhurst neighborhood a year later and finally settling in the Roosevelt neighborhood in 1924, where she graduated from Roosevelt High School. MacDonald married Robert Heskett in 1926 and the couple moved to a farm in the Olympic Peninsula's Chimacum Valley, near Chimacum a few miles south of Port Townsend. She left her husband in 1932 and returned to Seattle. In 1942, she married Donald C. MacDonald and moved to Vashon Island, where she wrote most of her books. The MacDonalds moved to California's Carmel Valley in 1956. MacDonald died in Seattle of cancer in 1958.

MacDonald rocketed to fame when her first book, The Egg and I, was published just after World War II. It was a huge bestseller. Depicting her life on the Chimacum Valley chicken farm, it introduced the characters Ma and Pa Kettle, who were featured in the movie version of The Egg and I and were so popular a series of films were later made featuring them. MacDonald wrote three more autobiographical books, including The Plague and I about her stay in a sanitarium for tuberculosis, and later a series of children's books that is still popular today.