About Barbara

A short, abbreviated biography by Chippy.

Barbara Newhall Follett was born March 4, 1914 in Hanover, New Hampshire. Her father was Wilson Follett, an English teacher at Dartmouth College at the time, who became a well-known editor and writer of the book, Follett’s Modern American Usage, still published today. Her mother was Helen Thomas Follett, a writer in her own right who later in life published two travel books.

A turning point for Barbara was her fascination with her father’s typewriter. “Tell me a story about it,” she demanded, and after her father explained how it worked, she began furiously producing her thoughts onto paper.

When she was four years old, she met an elderly Swedish gentleman who restored antiques, Mr. Oberg. Her stuffed toy rabbit had lost an eye, and Mr. Oberg paused in his work on two ancient clocks to repair her rabbit. Barbara was so impressed that not long afterward she composed her first important correspondence, a story in Mr. Oberg’s honor, and signed it with her full name:

Twelve clocks were on a shelf all ticking away.

They wanted to take a walk, so they Jumped down and started.

A little dog saw them and pushed one over, then another, and finally all.

They were broken into pieces. Then Mr. Oberg came along and said: “Oh my!” and put the pieces into a basket and took them home. He mended them; and now they are as good as new.

Barbara Newhall Follett

Believing Barbara would receive a better education at home rather than public or private school, the Folletts decided to design their own homeschool curriculum for Barbara, primarily created by Helen Follett.

When she was five years old, she was writing quite long stories, including a tale called The Life of the Spinning Wheel, the Rocking-Horse, and the Rabbit, which was unusually imaginative with a full-bodied vocabulary. The story is reproduced in the book, Barbara, the Unconscious Biography of a Child Genius, a much later book published in 1966 based on Barbara’s letters and stories.

In 1922, at age seven, Barbara, who played the violin, was composing striking poetry based on her music:

When I go to orchestra rehearsals,

there are often several passages for the

Triangle and Tambourine

together.

When they are together,

they sound like a big piece of metal

that has broken in thousandths

and is falling to the ground.

When she was eight years old, she began work on The House Without Windows as a gift for her mother. After the first manuscript was destroyed in a fire, it was recreated over a period of a few years, finally completed when she was eleven, and published in 1927 when she was twelve to great acclaim.

After publication of her novel, Barbara became fascinated with the sea and convinced her parents the next summer to allow her to accompany the crew of a ship, the Frederick H., a three-masted schooner bound for Nova Scotia. Though she was supposed to be a passenger, she insisted on doing chores as a deck-hand. After returning home, she turned her adventure into a novel, The Voyage of the Norman D., which was accepted for publication in 1928 when she was thirteen years old. Barbara was famous.

During this time, her father was spending more and more time in New York, and shortly after her latest novel was published, she received the news that her father was leaving the family for another woman. This devastated Barbara, who was very close to her father.

During the next few years, she and her mother travelled to several countries with Helen hoping to publish a travelogue of their adventures. This was not immediately successful, and they were forced to return to the United States. Barbara for some time was left with friends in Los Angeles, a place she “loathed,” particularly when she began attending school. She ran away to San Francisco, but was reported as a runaway, and was picked up by authorities. The case made national headlines.

All of this was especially tragic timing, as 1929 brought the beginning of the Great Depression and after returning and being reunited in New York, Helen Follett and Barbara found themselves very tight for money. Barbara was forced at age sixteen to get a job in New York as a typist after taking a course in shorthand and business typing, “a decidedly more tawdry use of its magic,” as she described it.

In June, she wrote to a friend, “My dreams are going through their death flurries, I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together—with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money.”

By 1934, she had written two more books, Lost Island, a novel, and Travels Without a Donkey, a travelogue. But they were never published.

Around this time, she met a man named Nickerson Rogers, an outdoorsman who shared her love of nature. They soon eloped and had adventures backpacking through Europe. They settled down in Brookline, Massachusetts where they were relatively secure and happy, at least for some time. Barbara took dance classes during the summers at Mills College, which she loved.

In 1939, she believed Rogers was seeing another woman. She wrote to a friend, “There is someone else… I had it coming to me, I know.”

Later in the same letter, she wrote, “I think I’ve persuaded him to give me my chance. He is a very kind person, really, and hates to hurt people. He hated to write that letter; that’s why it sounded so awful. I think that, if I can really prove that I’m different, why maybe things will work out. He still doesn’t quite believe it, as he says, that a leopard can change its spots! He thinks that in a month things will be all wrong again. So I say, at least let me have that month! I think I’ll get it, and I think I can win if I’ve got the strength.”

A later letter showed that Barbara was hopeful things could be salvaged: “I had had the feeling up till then that he definitely did not want to [make a go of things]. So imagine my amazement, my almost hysterical delight, when he said yes, he wanted to make a go of it.”

But the good feelings were not to last: “I don’t know what to say now. On the surface, things are terribly, terribly calm, and wrong – just as wrong as they can be. I am trying – we both are trying. I still think there is a chance that the outcome will be a happy one; but I would have to think that anyway in order to live; so you can draw any conclusions you like from that!”

That was Barbara’s last letter to her friend, or to anyone else as far as is known. On Thursday, December 7, 1939, Barbara and Nick quarreled, and she left their Brookline apartment that evening with $30 and a notebook.

She was never heard from again.

Nick, after she didn’t return, reported her missing two weeks later. The bureau of Missing Persons sent out a five-state alarm, but to no avail. Some believed she had run away, perhaps to her friend in California, but no evidence or communication from her has ever surfaced.

Barbara Newhall Follett, brilliant and once famous, simply disappeared.

You can find a longer bio on Farksolia, a site by a relative of Barbara's, linked in the side-bar.