Lutie Stearns is a name that most Wisconsinites probably don’t know. But she is a woman to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude for her enduring work to establish libraries for citizens across Wisconsin in the early 1900s. In this fictionalized biography, Madison author Stuart Stotts introduces young readers to this passionate and compassionate woman who was a crusader and advocate for libraries, books, and, above all, people. Working as one of the first two staff members of the Wisconsin Free Library Commission, Lutie established traveling libraries—trunks packed with a variety of reading materials for small communities that had no public library. Traveling in the sticky heat of summer or the frigid cold of winter, she went from town to town. Lutie spoke with lumberjacks and miners, farmers and store owners, men and women and children, offering each place she visited a traveling library: a revolving collection of books for anyone to borrow and return—at no cost. Stuart Stotts has imagined vivid scenes to convey aspects of Lutie’s childhood in Milwaukee, when she first developed the stutter that she had all of her life, as well as scenes of her professional life, when she traveled Wisconsin and worked toward the ideal of free public libraries for all. In an author’s note for young readers, Stotts talks about the questions he faced in writing a fictionalized biography, inviting children to contemplate the challenges of balancing fact and fiction. And at the story’s end, he writes, “Next time you go into a library, remember Lutie Stearns. Whisper her name.” Occasional archival photographs illustrate this lively volume. (Ages 8–11)

A biography of the woman who was responsible for establishing hundreds of traveling libraries in Wisconsin between 1895 and 1914.