Mary Ella Lyng

Mary Ella Lyng is a little-known American author whose surviving reputation rests on History Plays for the Grammar Grades, published in 1922. Library and archive records consistently credit her as the book’s author, and LibriVox lists her as active around 1922 rather than providing fuller life dates.

The book gathers short plays on figures and episodes from American history, including Columbus, Pocahontas, William Penn, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Grant and Lee, and notable women in history. Its classroom focus suggests she wrote with teachers and school-age performers in mind, aiming to make history more vivid and approachable.

Reliable biographical details beyond that are scarce in the sources I could confirm, so it is safest to describe her as an early 20th-century author remembered for educational drama for children. Her work has remained accessible through projects such as the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and LibriVox, which has helped preserve her place in public-domain reading collections.