author
Belle Wiley
These early 20th-century children's books invite young readers into imagined prehistoric worlds, from cliff dwellers to lake dwellers and tree-dweller children. Though little biographical information survives about the writer, the stories still stand out for their sense of adventure and curiosity about the distant past.
4 Audiobooks
Rago and Goni, the Tree-Dweller Children
by Belle Wiley
Children of the Cliff
by Belle Wiley, Grace Willard Edick
Mewanee, the Little Indian Boy
by Belle Wiley
Lodrix, the Little Lake Dweller
by Belle Wiley, Grace Willard Edick
About the author
Belle Wiley is credited as the author of several children's books published in the early 1900s, including Children of the Cliff, Lodrix, the Little Lake Dweller, Mewanee, the Little Indian Boy, The Mother Goose Primer, and Rago and Goni, the Tree-Dweller Children. Some of these works were created with Grace Willard Edick, and they were issued by publishers such as D. Appleton and C. E. Merrill.
The books are aimed at younger readers and often use storytelling to introduce imagined scenes from long-ago ways of life. That mix of simple narrative, education, and adventure gave her work a place in the era's popular children's literature.
Reliable biographical details about Belle Wiley herself are hard to confirm from readily available sources, so her life remains somewhat obscure today. What can be said with confidence is that her name remains attached to a small body of children's writing that continued to circulate through library catalogs, reprints, and digital archives long after its first publication.