Maud and Laura Ingalls Wilder
from Kathy Baxter
I once was helping a library patron, and we got onto the topic of the
BETSY-TACY books. By a happy coincidence, to me, she had grown up
in Claremont, California. She had been a shelver in the library there
and Maud was a regular patron. Maud would never read the Wilder books,
she told me, because she did not want to be accused in any way, shape or
form of copying or being influenced by them. But one day, in the
mid-1960s, Maud walked in and told her she had decided not to write
any more Betsy-Tacy books, and now, today, she was going to start
reading Laura Ingalls Wilder.