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Elizabeth Letts

Biography

Elizabeth Letts

Elizabeth Letts was born in Southern California where she spent all of her time on the back of a horse when she wasn’t reading a book. She graduated from Yale with a major in history and then joined the Peace Corps. After her Peace Corps service, she studied at the Yale School of Nursing where she trained as a certified nurse-midwife. She began publishing books while working and raising four children.

Her books have been Indie Next, Library Reads and Junior Library Guild selections, and a Goodreads Reader’s Choice Finalist. She’s been honored with the 2017 PEN USA Award for Research Non-Fiction, the Daniel P Lenehan Award for Media Excellence from the United States Equestrian Foundation, and her books have reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller lists.

She lives in southern California and spends her summers in Northern Michigan. She loves nothing more than a good road trip and has driven across the country, coast-to-coast more than 20 times.

Elizabeth Letts

Books by Elizabeth Letts

by Elizabeth Letts - Biography, History, Nonfiction

In 1954, 63-year-old Maine farmer Annie Wilkins embarked on an impossible journey. She had no money and no family, she had just lost her farm, and her doctor had given her only two years to live. But Annie wanted to see the Pacific Ocean before she died. So she bought a cast-off brown gelding named Tarzan, donned men’s dungarees and headed south. Annie, Tarzan and her dog, Depeche Toi, rode straight into a world transformed by the rapid construction of modern highways. In a decade when car ownership nearly tripled, television’s influence was expanding fast, and homeowners began locking their doors, Annie and her four-footed companions inspired an outpouring of neighborliness in a rapidly changing world.

by Elizabeth Letts - Fiction, Historical Fiction

As soon as she learns that MGM is adapting her late husband’s masterpiece, THE WIZARD OF OZ, for the screen, Maud Gage Baum sets about trying to finagle her way onto the set. Nineteen years after Frank’s passing, Maud is the only person who can help the producers stay true to the spirit of the book. But the moment she hears Judy Garland rehearsing the first notes of “Over the Rainbow,” Maud recognizes the yearning that defined her own life story. Judy reminds Maud of a young girl she cared for and tried to help in South Dakota, a dreamer who never got her happy ending. Now, with the young actress under pressure from the studio as well as her ambitious stage mother, Maud resolves to protect her --- the way she tried so hard to protect the real Dorothy.

by Elizabeth Letts - History, Nonfiction

In the chaotic last days of World War II, a small troop of battle-weary American soldiers captures a German spy and makes an astonishing find --- his briefcase is empty but for photos of beautiful white horses that have been stolen and kept on a secret farm behind enemy lines. Hitler has stockpiled the world’s finest purebreds in order to breed the perfect military machine --- an equine master race. But with the starving Russian army closing in, the animals are in imminent danger of being slaughtered for food. With only hours to spare, one of the Army’s last great cavalrymen, American colonel Hank Reed, makes a bold decision --- with General George Patton’s blessing --- to mount a covert rescue operation.

by Elizabeth Letts - Biography, Nonfiction

Elizabeth Letts tells the remarkable story of Snowman and Harry de Leyer, the inseperable horse and rider who became unlikely champions in the 1958 National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden in New York City.