Little Britches Study Guide

Ralph Moody, born 1898, was an American writer and cowboy best known for his autobiographical novel series, Little Britches, which chronicles his childhood growing up Colorado. Like the character in his first book, Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers, Moody moved from his home in East Rochester, New Hampshire, to a ranch near Littleton, Colorado at the age of eight. After his father died, 11-year-old Moody assumed his father’s responsibilities, working with sister Grace to provide for his mother and siblings. When Moody and his family eventually returned to the East Coast, Moody had trouble adjusting and soon left his family to live on his grandfather’s farm in Maine. From there, he traveled west, working odd jobs to support his family as he slowly made his way back to Colorado. In 1922, he married Edna Huggins of Boston, moving to Kansas City, Missouri and having three children. After several years at Procter & Gamble Company, a consumer goods company, he moved to California, starting new work at B/G Foods, Inc. At the age of 50, he began taking writing classes, leading him to write Little Britches. In total, Moody wrote 17 novels, most centered around the American West and many based around his own life experiences. Moody outlived his wife, who died in the early 1970s, and spent his last years in Massachusetts with his mother, Mary Emma, and younger sister, Elizabeth. He died in 1982.

Little Britches is an autobiographical novel firmly based on real events and people. Since the mid-19th century, families like Ralph’s had been migrating west in search of better work and in some cases, fortune. Though Ralph’s family finds itself at the tail end of this wave of westward expansion, their path was one well-worn by many Americans before them. Like Ralph’s family, many of these pioneers were also met with harsh conditions upon arrival, quickly dispelling their idyllic notions of the American West. It is also during this era that the now-romanticized figure of the cowboy emerged. Though often portrayed in popular culture as chivalrous vagabonds whose talents as gunslingers and riders allowed them to toe the line between outlaw and authority figure, cowboys of the day were more often cut after the mold of men like Hiram Buckram: talented ranch hands and cowherds whose daily lives were full of hard, grueling work. Many of the broader political and economic issues explored in Little Britches are also explicitly rooted in history. The gold panic that nearly bankrupts Cousin Phil and many of Ralph’s neighbors, for instance, was a real phenomenon, taking place in 1907. It is often considered the first worldwide financial crisis of the 20th century. Water rights and water management—a major theme in Little Britches—was also common source of conflict out in the dry lands of the American Midwest. Writing in the 1950s, after the droughts of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, Moody could not have been blind to devastation that such conflicts wrought on ranchers and farmers.

Little Britches belongs within a genre of children’s novels which draw inspiration from the real-life experiences of their author. While some aspects of Little Britches are fictionalized, such as Moody’s mother’s name, the story is largely an authentic portrayal of Ralph Moody’s experience growing up as a rancher in Colorado. This authenticity defines many of Moody’s other novels, including Man of the Family, the sequel to Little Britches. In this book, Moody picks up where Little Britches left off, depicting the aftermath of his father’s death and his and his sister’s efforts to provide for their family. This series extends to encompass eight more books, tracing Moody’s journey from childhood to young adulthood. J.D. Fitzgerald’s The Great Brain, another autobiographical children’s novel, explores similar themes as Little Britches. Written in the late 1960s, The Great Brain chronicles the adventures of J.D.— the author—and his mischievous older brother Tom Fitzgerald as they grow up in Utah in the late 1890s. Much like in Little Britches, the American West is a defining backdrop in these stories, as is the importance of family. Much the same is true of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series, a set of children’s novels written in the 1930s and 1940s. Rooted in the author’s own childhood experiences in the American Midwest in the mid to late 19th century, the stories emphasize importance of family and hard work, all set against the backdrop of the American western frontier.