Mary Mapes Dodge

Mary Mapes Dodge (1831–1905) was born in New York City and turned to writing to support her two young sons after her husband's early death. She is best remembered for Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates (1865), a novel of Dutch life and ice-skating culture written, by her own account, entirely from research rather than firsthand travel — she did not visit the Netherlands herself until decades after its publication. In 1873 she became the founding editor of St. Nicholas Magazine, a children's periodical she led for over thirty years and shaped into one of the most influential publications of its kind, printing early or serialized work by Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and Rudyard Kipling among many others. She died in Onteora Park, New York, at seventy-four.