Mary Emma & Company (24 page)

About the Author

R
ALPH
O
WEN
M
OODY
was born December 16, 1898, in Rochester, N. H. His father was a farmer whose illness forced the family to move to Colorado when Ralph was eight years old. The family's life in the new surroundings is told from the point of view of the boy himself in
Little Britches
(1950).

The farm failed and the family moved into Littleton, Colorado, when Ralph was about eleven. Soon after, the elder Moody died of pneumonia, leaving Ralph as the oldest boy, the man of the family. After a year or so—described in
Man of the Family
(1951) and
The Home Ranch
(1956)—Mrs. Moody brought her three sons and three daughters back to Medford, Mass., where Ralph completed his formal education through the eighth grade of grammar school. This is the period of
Mary Emma & Company
(1961). Later, Ralph joined his maternal grandfather on his farm in Maine—the period covered in
The Fields of Home
(1953).

In spite of his farming experience, Ralph Moody was not destined to be a farmer. He abandoned the land because his wife was determined to raise her family (they have three children) in the city. He completed his high-school studies in the evening and continued his education in university extension classes.

“When I was twenty-one,” he writes, “I got a diary as a birthday present and I wrote in it that I was going to work as hard as I could, save fifty thousand dollars by the time I was fifty, and then start writing.” True to his word, he did start writing on the night of his fiftieth birthday.

—Adapted from the
Wilson Library Bulletin