The most personal and authentic account of Henry's life seems to be that given by her sister Gertrude Breithaupt Jupp, writing for Horn Book Magazine in January 1950, after Marguerite won the (1949) Newbery Medal for King of the Wind. Apparent in the account is a close relationship between Henry and her sister, who is five years older, for Gertrude writes of her "rapture" as she held her newborn sister on her lap and of her zeal in telling her small childhood world about the advent of the baby. "I have been boasting about that little sister ever since."
Henry's childhood seems to have been a happy one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she grew up the youngest of the five children born to Louis and Anna Breithaupt. Study around the round dining table with their father reading and their mother darning a pile of white stockings, Marguerite struggling over her mathematics--these glimpses that Jupp provides set a family-centered picture of childhood. Louis Breithaupt, a printer, often invited the children to his office on Saturdays, and his gifts of small pads of brightly colored paper seems to have invited the writing of verses and stories that Jupp recalls as being "as highly colored as the paper on which they were written." At the surprisingly early age of eleven Henry sold her first story to the Delineator, a magazine published in New York and directed toward women.
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