Ethel Twycross Foster

Ethel Twycross Foster was an American writer born in 1881 and died in 1963. The clearest surviving record of her work points to Little Tales of the Desert, a children’s book first published in Los Angeles in 1913 and illustrated by Hernando G. Villa.

That book centers on a six-year-old girl named Mary during a Christmas vacation in the Arizona desert, and it helped preserve Foster’s name through later digitizations and audio editions. The stories are remembered for their gentle wonder, family-centered perspective, and interest in desert animals and everyday discoveries.

Very little widely documented biographical detail about Foster appears to be available online today. What can be said with confidence is that her writing is tied to an early California-Arizona setting and to a rare, independently published children’s work that has continued to find new readers through public-domain archives.