Harriett Mulford Stone was born on June 22, 1844 in New Haven, CT. She graduated Miss Dutton’s School at Grove Hall in New Haven in 1862, where she displayed great literary potential. In 1878, writing under the pen name Margaret Sidney, she began submitting children's short stories to the magazine Wide Awake published in Boston by the firm owned by Daniel Lothrop. Her stories, “Polly Pepper's Chicken Pie” and “Phronsie Pepper's New Shoes,” were an instantaneous success. Lothrop was impressed by her writing and encouraged her to continue creating stories.
She then began work on her most famous stories the "Five Little Peppers" series, which was first published in Wide Awake in 1881. The series grew to included:
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1881)
Five Little Peppers Midway (1890)
Five Little Peppers Grown Up (1892)
Five Little Peppers: Phronsie Pepper (1897)
Five Little Peppers: The Stories Polly Pepper Told (1899)
Five Little Peppers: The Adventures of Joel Pepper (1900)
Five Little Peppers Abroad (1902)
Five Little Peppers At School (1903)
Five Little Peppers and Their Friends (1904)
Five Little Peppers: Ben Pepper (1905)
Five Little Peppers in the Little Brown House (1907)
Five Little Peppers: Our Davie Pepper (1916)
Harriett and Daniel were married in 1881. After Daniel's death on March 18, 1892, Harriett continued as the head of D. Lothrop & Co.
Harriett wrote over 30 books. In addition to the “Five Little Peppers” series, Wikipedia lists the following publications.
So as by Fire (Boston, 1881)
Half Year at Bronckton (1882)
The Pettibone Name (1883), a novel of New England life
What the Seven Did (1883)
Who Told it to Me (1884)
Ballad of the Lost Hare (1884) From the Collections at the Library of Congress
The Golden West (1885)
How they Went to Europe (1885)
Hester, and other New England Stories (1886)
The Minute-Man (1886)
Two Modern Little Princes (1887)
Dilly and the Captain (1887)
St. George and the Dragon (1888)
The Judges' Cave; Being a Romance of the New Haven Colony in the Days of the Regicides, 1661 (1900)
A Little Maid of Concord Town (1898)
A Little Maid of Boston Town (1910)