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Kentucky's Little Colonel: Annie Fellows Johnston Etexts

If all that comes to mind when you hear the title The Little Colonel is curly-haired moppet Shirley Temple and the legendary tapdancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson spectacularly tappety-tapping their way up and down a staircase in an old black-and-white movie, you may want to check out the book on which the film was based, as well as the many books that followed it, available for downloading on the Web.

Indiana native Annie Fellows Johnston, born in Evansville on May 15, 1863, had begun writing seriously to support herself and her stepchildren after her husband died. Inspired by a Civil War veteran and his granddaughter, Hattie Cochran, whom she met on a visit to Kentucky, she penned the story of five-year-old Lloyd Sherman, the title character of The Little Colonel, beginning what was to become an extremely popular series.


As the series develops, Lloyd grows into a beautiful and accomplished young girl. Whether having a house party, attending boarding school, or traveling out West, Lloyd is the embodiment of the most prized qualities of her day: she is gracious, ladylike, kind to inferiors, secure in her world and her place in it.

Johnston eventually settled in the land of Kentucky that had so influenced her writing, and died there, in Pewee Valley, on October 5, 1931, four years before Shirley Temple's Little Colonel film was released.

All thirteen books of Annie Fellows Johnston's Little Colonel series are now available on the Web.

Little Colonel
#1 The Little Colonel, 1895
#2 Two Little Knights of Kentucky (Who Were the Little Colonel's Neighbors), 1899
#3 The Little Colonel's Holidays, 1901
#4 The Little Colonel's House Party, 1901
#5 The Little Colonel's Hero, 1903
#6 The Little Colonel at Boarding-School, 1904
#7 The Little Colonel in Arizona, 1905
#8 The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation, 1905
#9 The Little Colonel, Maid of Honor, 1906
#10 The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding, 1907
#11 Mary Ware, the Little Colonel's Chum, 1908
#12 Mary Ware in Texas, 1910
#13 Mary Ware in the Promised Land, 1912

Story of the Red Cross as Told to the Little Colonel, 1918 (originally published in The Little Colonel's Hero)

Additional works on the Web by Annie Fellows Johnston
Big Brother, 1894
In League with Israel: A Tale of the Chattanooga Conference, 1896
The Giant Scissors, 1898
Mildred's Inheritance: Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way, 1899
Travelers Five Along Life's Highway: Jimmy, Gideon Wiggan, the Clown, Wexley Snathers, Bap. Sloan, 1899
Story of Dago, 1900
Cicely: And Other Stories, 1903
Flip's "Islands of Providence," 1903
The Quilt That Jack Built: How He Won the Bicycle, 1904
Rescue of the Princess Winsome: A Fairy Play for Old and Young, 1908
Ole Mammy's Torment, 1910
Georgina of the Rainbows, 1916
It Was the Road to Jericho, 1919