Miss Pickerell is a middle aged spinster, living on a farm in Square Toe City with her beloved cow and also with her adult niece and nephew, Dwight and Rosemary. The pedagogic side of MacGregor's writing is quite noticeable, with fairly frequent stops to somewhat awkwardly emphasize (usually to Miss Pickerell) some scientific fact. I have to say that this entry does seem mostly accurate, at least as of 1954. The Miss Pickerell books were noted at the time for their effort to emphasize accurate science, even when she was traveling to Mars. (These books were copiously illustrated by Paul Galdone, an artisit I remember very well from my childhood.) Several further Miss Pickerell books were written by Dora Pantell, and credited to Pantell and MacGregor for a while, though as far as I can tell, it's unlikely that Pantell was working from any material MacGregor left behind. She had completed the fourth Miss Pickerell book, the one at hand, Miss Pickerell Goes to the Arctic, and that came out the same year. Two further Miss Pickerell books appeared before she died, only 47, in 1954. Miss Pickerell first appeared in a short story in 1950, and the story was expanded into Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars. She began writing in the 1940s, and her first children's book was published in 1947. She seems to have lived a peripatetic life - she got her degree in Library Science from the University of Washington in Seattle, and worked as a librarian in Hawaii, in Chicago, and in Florida among other places.

(Particularly, I suppose, the first in the series, Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars, from 1951.) I never encountered these books as a child, so I thought a look would be interesting.Įllen MacGregor was born in 1906 in Baltimore. I remembered Miss Pickerell as a the heroine of a series of books that some people used to cite as early science fiction they read when they were kids. Well, I thought that when I found a copy of Miss Pickerell Goes to the Arctic for 50 cents (the same price it sold for from Scholastic in the 1970s!) at an estate sale last weekend. I thought it time to return to a subtheme of this blog - old children's books. Pickerell Goes to the Arctic, by Ellen MacGregor

Miss pickerell goes to mars