“The Egg and I” took 1st America by surprise in 1945, selling over 1,000,000 within 10 a few months of it’s first publication. Betty MacDonald’s first publication about her escapades as a young wife on the chicken farm for the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state was a breathing of fresh air to a global that, in the wake of WWII, sorely required it. Betty lived with her first hubby near Chimacum, Washington – a newlywed performing her best to adapt to and help operate their small chicken plantation, from 1927 to 1931..Read More about The Egg and We MacDonald was an enthusiastic observer of the people around her, and she calls a spade a spade, “and there were a a lot of spades.”

The Egg and I used to be adapted for stage, radio and screen, using the film version starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. The film version also launched the world to Ma and Pa Kettle, the eccentric country bumpkins portrayed with the inimitable Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride, who had been so popular a string of spin-off films was produced about their journeys. Betty MacDonald had written three other memoirs, aswell as the still popular Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series for children, and is identified by many as an important America humorist. In her MA thesis, The Egg and Us: Contextualization and Historicization (2014), Samantha Hoekstra writes:

“Some scholars credit MacDonald with having inspired Shirley Jackson, Erma Bombeck, and additional purveyors of local humor, but possibly the most appropriate inheritor from the MacDonald tradition is the modern article writer David Sedaris. … One of the most significant similarities can be that having less conventionality in both families is offered as regular and worthy of respect. Even as they make fun of their families’ foibles, the authors convey an undeniable warmth, affection, and acceptance. In a sense, they challenge the notion of the ‘normal’ American family members.”

This is why MacDonald’s writing continues to be relevant and funny today.