Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, by Margaret Sidney, was published in 1881 during a period of great financial instability for America. The Civil War was over, but its impact was still being felt. In the book and its sequels, the Pepper kids—Ben, Polly, Joel, Davie, and the inexplicably named "Phronsie"—are so dirt-poor they have to mend their broken stove using part of an old boot. Yet they are chipperly united in a common goal: to bring happiness to their bankrupt single mom. The book was a hit in its day and remains in print. One fan was Eudora Welty, who rhapsodized about the book in her 1969 autobiographical essay "A Sweet Devouring." According to Welty, when she discovered the Peppers in 1918, at age 9, she began daydreaming about being poor. Not just poor, but really poor, like Polly Pepper, whose destitution seemed enticingly exotic to the relatively comfortable Welty.