Silver Spring, Md. — Meet Valerie.
She was once an American girl, and now she is sitting in her living room, talking with a father of two American girls, and she is saying something that grabs his attention:
"You realize you're trusting me. I'm talking to your daughters and you're not there."
Nothing to worry about, really. The woman across the coffee table is the mother of five girls. Their names are Molly, Josephina, Samantha and Felicity. Plus there's the newborn, Kit. Five American Girls every one of them different, every one of them with separate challenges. (Every one of them a best seller, too.)
Valerie Tripp is the principal author of the "American Girl" books, which with sales of 60 million volumes make her something of the American equivalent of J.K. Rowling. The books are stories about American childhoods in Williamsburg, for example, at the time of the American Revolution, or in colonial New Mexico when the Santa Fe Trail opens, or in the Midwest during the Great Depression. Every girl on your street (or maybe in your home) has read them.
So here is an unusual, maybe unprecedented, phenomenon in American life: a fad that is not bad. Actually it may be more than a fad. These stories may be destined to be part of the American cultural quilt, in part because they reflect the richness of that quilt. They have a message: We are all different. In lots of ways we are the same. That is the story of America, which is why these are classic American stories, if perhaps not quite American classics.
Valerie Tripp herself is part of a long American tradition: the collector of stories. Lincoln was one, and so was Sherwood Anderson, and so is Eudora Welty. Part of the fourth generation of Tripps to grow up in Mount Kisco, N.Y., she was one of five children, and from the start she searched for a way to set herself apart. She became known as the one who listened to the older people's stories. More and more that word stories cropped into her thoughts. Stories were a way of looking at life, and they became the way she looked at her life.
She looked for a job that would allow her to read all day long and ended up at Little, Brown in Boston. She was supposed to comb college textbooks for errors. She was a big flop. She drifted over to Boston Educational Research, helping to develop a reading program with a woman whose name now is a trademark, at least to girls and their parents: Pleasant Rowland.
Together they had a complaint: There really wasn't as much good literature for girls as there was for boys stories with the girls as heroines, written for girls the same age as the characters. They went off in different directions, one to Wisconsin and the other to California, but the idea lingered with both of them. Eventually they decided to do the stories, beginning with volumes called "Meet Addy" and "Meet Josephina." The dolls, the outfits, the furniture, the advice books and the magazines, would come later. Much profit in all of that stuff, but remember: The books came first.
The books deal with the common challenges of a girl's life a father who is away (Molly, whose father is in England during World War II); a girl trying to make sense of a changing world (Kit, distressed when the family loses its business during the Depression); making friends with someone who has an entirely different background (Samantha, who awakens to the sacrifices and enrichment that friendship entails); experiencing the pain and joy of new independence (Josephina, who confronts her fears).
She went long ago and far away to do the Josephina stories, which are based in the Southwest in 1824. She, her husband and their 13-year-old daughter moved to New Mexico, learned Spanish, took cooking lessons. Tripp hung around beauty parlors and grocery stores, looking for old ladies, listening to their stories about their grandmothers. A lot of those conversations ended up in her books like the sewing scene, where Josephina (who is afraid of goats and guns, of snakes and strangers) is told to make her threads short so the devil won't catch onto the end of them.
"I write about the situations girls face today," Tripp says. "I try to establish a silky ribbon of connection between these girls from the past and girls today. Felicity's world, for example, is tight and constricted, and some kids today have worlds that feel tight and constricted to them. And in the books they make bad mistakes and learn that it's OK to do that."
That is the one truth that launched 27 books. A whole lot more has been written about a whole lot less.
David Shribman is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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