Betty MacDonald Books in Order

If you want her best-known memoir: The Egg and I → The Plague and I → Anybody Can Do Anything → Onions in the Stew
If you want her classic children's books: Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle → Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic → Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Farm → Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle
If you want a standalone children's story: Nancy and Plum
If you want a one-volume life story: Who, Me?

Betty MacDonald was born Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard in Boulder, Colorado, in 1907. Her father was a mining engineer, so childhood meant movement, with time in Mexico, Idaho, and Montana before the family settled in Seattle. She graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1924, and the Pacific Northwest would become the setting readers most strongly associate with her work.

She did not begin with a tidy plan to become a writer at all.

After a year at the University of Washington, she married Robert Heskett in 1927 and moved to a chicken farm in Chimacum Valley, near Port Townsend. The work was rough, the house lacked comforts, and country life was nothing like the romantic version. Those years later became The Egg and I, which turns chores, mud, chickens, and strange neighbors into very sharp comedy.

The marriage ended in 1931, and MacDonald returned to Seattle with her daughters, Anne and Joan. She worked one job after another during the Depression, then spent nine months at Firland Sanatorium in 1937 and 1938 after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Those experiences fed Anybody Can Do Anything and The Plague and I, books that stay funny without pretending the hard parts were small.

Her break came because of her sister Mary Bard. Mary told a publishing scout that Betty was writing a book, which forced Betty to produce a proposal for The Egg and I in a hurry. She kept going, finished the manuscript, and saw it published in 1945 after serialization. The book sold its first million copies in less than a year, became a 1947 film, and helped launch the Ma and Pa Kettle movies.

What readers found was a voice that sounded amused, practical, and very awake.

In 1942 she had married Donald C. MacDonald, and on Vashon Island she wrote most of her later books. Onions in the Stew grew from family life there, with ferries, weather, house repairs, and daily disorder all turned into material. The bedtime stories she told her daughters, nieces, nephews, and neighborhood children grew into Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and its sequels, where humor and affection matter as much as the magic cures.

Nancy and Plum shows another side of her, gentler and more storybook, but still interested in family ties and small acts of endurance. Across her work, she keeps returning to stubborn people, domestic chaos, the Pacific Northwest, and the relief of laughing at a bad situation before it swallows you.

The MacDonalds moved to Carmel Valley, California, in 1956, though she returned to Seattle for cancer treatment. She died there in 1958 at age fifty. Her daughter Anne MacDonald Canham later used Betty's notes to complete Happy Birthday, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, which is a good reminder that her stories kept traveling long after she was gone.