Living among Native Americans taught Beatty much about their culture and customs, material she later drew on for many of her books, including her very first,
Indian Canoemaker. The Quillayute tribe, into which Beatty was adopted because her birthday coincided with one of their holidays, is the main focus of this early work.
Both Beatty's father and her mother, Jessie, were enthusiastic readers and their daughter soon picked up the habit. Writing in Something about the Author Autobiography Series (SAAS) she remembered her first reader with delight, "I loved every word of it.... One sentence in particular thrilled me.... All others went, 'He said, "This is my dog,"' or 'She said, "This is my ball."' The sentence I loved so was inverted to read '"This is my house," said she.' Said she!... It was poetry to my six-year-old mind." It was this love of reading that helped carry Beatty through a five-month long bout with severe illness when she was ten, an infection so serious that she had to be hospitalized. In her SAAS essay, Beatty pointed to this episode as especially important in her eventual decision to write.
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