Barrett Willoughby

Alaska, it's been said, is less a state of the Union than a state of mind. A romantic sense of the north has been enhanced (and sometimes created) by the authors who spun romances about their experiences on America's cold frontier. The names of some of these authors still come quickly to mind - Robert Service, Jack London - but others who wrote of heroic adventures in the north have now been all but forgotten. One of the forgotten wrote also of heroines. Barrett Willoughby was hailed in her time as "the first real Alaskan novelist," and her works of fiction and nonfiction charmed the national press during the 1920s and 1930s. Starting in early childhood, Willoughby spent many years in Alaska - far more time than did any of her still-famous contemporaries - and loved the north passionately. But the north she loved and described vividly was not the harsh and perennially frozen place in which other authors set their tales. "I want to tell the whole world what a beautiful land it is," she told a national radio audience in 1932. "A land of bright courage and joyous living, where everybody had an awfully good time.". Hardworking, intelligent, and stubbornly idealistic, Barrett Willoughby made her way to success in what might be seen as doubly a man's world: she was both a best-selling author and a well-accepted Alaskan. Although she never achieved real greatness Barrett Willoughby's work is too good to be forgotten.