Forgotten Author of the Week - Louis Gladys Leppard

I have been slowly getting to some of the favorite authors that my readers said they loved in an earlier post. It has definitely taken me to books and authors that I didn't know anything about, but that is kind of the point of this blog isn't it?

Louis Gladys Leppard is the author of The Mandie Series. A group of stories that is now considered primarily religious, but when originally published was considered to be books on morality for girls. Leppard wrote her first Mandie story when she was only eleven years old, but did not become a published author until adulthood. Besides being an author, Leppard also worked as a professional singer, actress, and playwright. She studied at the New York School of Music and the Voice Beautiful Institute. She and her two sisters even formed a singing group called the Larke Sisters. As of 2004, just four years before her death, there were 41 Mandie books. The spunky heroine lives in North Carolina in the early 1900's and encounters adventure and solves mysteries with the help of her friends, family, and pet cat Snowball. Leppard promised that her books would never contain anything occult or vulgar and in the books Mandie is depicted as a faithful Christian. The Mandie books often dealt with issues of discrimination and prejudice relating to race (particularly Native Americans), class, and disability.