Well educated and raised as a lady, Betty Bard in 1927 married a man she barely knew. The newlyweds immediately started a chicken ranch in the remote American Northwest. Here Betty had to contend with a difficult husband, loneliness, pregnancy, primitive neighbors, and thousands of chickens. This was the stuff of her first book, The Egg and I. A Hollywood movie of the book appeared two years later and at least eight further movies based on the popular Egg and I characters Ma and Pa Kettle were to follow. But what really happened to Betty on the farm?
This first ever biography of Betty MacDonald concentrates on the facts behind the fiction: the true story of Betty's first marriage, the legal trouble she ran into after the publication of The Egg and I, and her her untimely death from cancer at the age of only fifty.