Lucretia P. Hale

Lucretia Peabody Hale (1820-1900) was an American writer born into a prominent Boston literary family; she was a sister of the author and clergyman Edward Everett Hale. She wrote essays, instructional books and fiction, but is remembered above all for her humorous Peterkin stories, which began appearing in periodicals in the late 1860s. Her comic sketches of a lovably illogical family became a lasting favorite of nineteenth-century American children's literature.