Book Description

Self-published book of poems by a young author whose childhood diary had caused a sensation three years earlier upon its publication in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in spring 1920, and subsequently as a book. Whiteley's childhood record of growing up in the woods in a logging town in Oregon was painstakingly pieced back together from its torn fragments and is still controversial as to its true origins. Shortly after publication, it was claimed that she wrote the diary as an adult, not a child, and it was branded a hoax. She died in a mental hospital in London in 1992 where she had been institutionalized since 1948.