It’s the birthday of child prodigy novelist Barbara Newhall Follett (1914 – ???), whose bestselling novel, The House Without Windows, was published when she was only twelve and who disappeared without a trace at the age of 26. The mystery of where she went or how she eventually died has never been solved.

(Note to J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon: And that’s how it’s done.)

Follett was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, to Wilson Follett, an editor and critic, and Helen Thomas Follett, a children’s writer. By four Follett was falling in love with her father’s typewriter, which she snuck into her own room. Still too young to write well with a pencil, Follett began using the typewriter to pound out “wild and exuberant poems and fairy tales”. She often wrote about nature, her other great passion, and by the age of eight was writing her first novel—sometimes 4,000 words a day. Follett had no patience for neighborhood friends who wanted to play when she was working and wrote to one friend, “You don’t understand why I have my work to do—because, at this particular time, you have none at all.”

Eight year olds, right?*

This first novel was intended to be a gift on Follett’s ninth birthday to her mother, but soon after finishing it, the manuscript was destroyed in a house fire. Follett spent the next three years writing it again. In 1926, when Follett was twelve, her father submitted the finished manuscript to Alfred Knopf, where he worked, and The House Without Windows was published the next year to great acclaim. The novel was called “almost unbearably beautiful” and told the tale of a little girl named Eepersip who leaves her parents’ home to live in nature and become a wood nymph, like you do.

Follett went off at 13 to work as a “cabin boy” on a ship heading to Nova Scotia, and when she returned some months later, she had the manuscript to her second novel, The Voyage of the Norman D., also published to great acclaim. Unfortunately, her father then left her mother for a younger woman. Follett was devastated, and life became fractured and desperate. (Without being judgy, I’d like to suggest that Wilson Follett was a terrible terrible person.) By 16, Follett was working as a typist and writing that her dreams were dying. Follett did write another novel and a travelogue, but her writing had fallen from fashion. She met an outdoorsman named Nickerson Rogers, walked the Appalachian Trail with him, and eventually married him. When their marriage began to sour, she walked out of their apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts, and was never seen again.

Just a few years ago, The House Without Windows was reprinted with gorgeous illustrations by Jackie Morris.

Have a beautiful, blue-skied Thursday, read something that makes you fall in love with nature again, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.

*Is anyone else thinking of Harriet the Spy right now? “Half of [my classmates] don’t even have a profession.” But Harriet was in the sixth grade when she wrote that.