Margaret Sidney

While her brothers are away at boarding school, Polly Pepper and her classmates are involved in a train accident that leaves the brakeman's wife a widow, so Polly tries to raise money for the brakeman's family

Five Little Peppers and How They Grew was originally serialized in an 1880 edition of Wide Awake, a children's magazine. The publisher of the magazine, Daniel Lothrop, loved the Pepper stories so much that he published a hard-cover edition of the story -- and married the author in 1881. In 1883 the couple moved to …