Frances Margaret Fox

Born on June 23, 1870, in South Farmington, Massachusetts, Frances Margaret Fox later moved to Mackinaw City, Michigan, where the place would shape much of her life and writing. Accounts of her childhood describe hardship, but she found encouragement with the Joslyn family of Bay City, for whose children she invented stories that later became the basis of her books.

She published her first children’s book, Farmer Brown and the Birds, in 1901. Over the course of her career, she wrote fifty-one books along with many magazine pieces, and she became especially well known for her Little Bear stories. She also spent time researching at the Library of Congress, reflecting the care she brought to her work.

When her writing income allowed, she returned to Mackinaw City and built a stone house called "Happy Landing" on the Straits of Mackinac. She was remembered locally for inviting children to her Sunshine Club, where she shared lemonade and tested new stories by reading them aloud. She died on March 1, 1959, and, according to accounts from Michigan literary archives, her ashes were scattered in the Straits she loved.