Beatrice Larned Massey

Beatrice Larned Massey is known for It Might Have Been Worse: A Motor Trip from Coast to Coast, published in San Francisco in 1920. Library and public-domain records consistently identify it as her best-known work, and available catalogs suggest it is the only book currently attributed to her with confidence.

In the book, she recounts a cross-country automobile journey from New York City to San Francisco and says in the foreword that she hoped the account would serve both as an entertaining narrative and as a practical guide for other motorists. That mix of humor, observation, and firsthand travel detail gives the book much of its lasting charm.

Reliable biographical information about her life beyond this book is scarce in the sources I could confirm, so it is safest to remember her primarily as an early American travel writer whose memoir preserves the experience of long-distance car travel in the years when such a trip was still a real adventure.