Mary Chase Mills Lyall

Mary Chase Mills Lyall was an American writer born in 1879. The work most clearly linked to her today is The Cubies' ABC (1913), a playful alphabet book published by G. P. Putnam's Sons and now preserved through Project Gutenberg and other public-domain archives.

That book was created with her husband, Earl Harvey Lyall, who provided the illustrations. Although it looks like a children's alphabet book on the surface, modern descriptions of the volume often note its humorous, satirical take on Cubism and the art-world excitement surrounding the early 1910s.

Reliable biographical detail about her life beyond that book is limited in the sources I could confirm here, so it is safest to remember her as a writer whose surviving reputation rests on one unusual, charming collaboration at the intersection of children's literature, humor, and modern art.