Diary written by one Lois B. Whitwell in the ‘voice’ of of her daughter Maxine Alice Whitwell (then three years old), updated near-daily through the year 1933. Without breaking character, the writer carefully records all things seen, done, and spoken by her daughter, to mildly unnerving effect. (“It is another cold day. Mother was sick in bed all forenoon and she thot I nearly worried her to death.” And: “I decided that when I get big and Mother gets little, she will be my little baby and I’ll be her mother…I played that things were about to get me tonight, to get Mother to fight them off…I wanted badly to play in the fire but they wouldn’t allow it.”) Small glimpses of the family’s working life appear throughout: sowing oats and planting cabbages; buying calves; making and mending clothes; driving trucks and tractors. “Daddy went to town today and Mother had to tend the store…Mother meant to kill a chicken for breakfast in the morning but Daddy had been hunting and came back with two squirrels….” While her parents work, the toddler diarist preoccupies herself with pet hens, rabbits, imaginary foxes, Sunday school, hair curlers, and troublemaking. Census records show the family living in the Ozarks in the town of Kelly (and the diary, a promotion for an insurance company in nearby Doniphan, further supports). Again, according to census records, they did in fact own a store, though by 1940 her father lists his occupation solely as “farmer.” A child’s-eye view of rural Depression era domestic and family life, observed and impersonated at close range.

$950