The Boxcar Children

The Boxcar Children was published in 1942 and was Gertrude Chandler Warner's first book about the Alden children. She had been a primary school teacher and had written the story after thinking about what a group of children could reasonably do for themselves, and the result is unusually practical for children's fiction: the boxcar gets a brook for water, an improvised bed, a set of dishes and a garden, and the children's resourcefulness is the subject of the book.

The plot is gentle and the threats are domestic. The grandfather exists mostly as a rumour at the start, and the doctor who befriends the children is one of the few adults who behaves well. Warner revised the novel in the late 1950s for a different edition, and the text most readers encounter now is the shorter and simpler of the two. The children's ages are given in the book and the dynamics among the four of them carry the chapter structure.

The series continued with Warner writing nineteen volumes and later authors adding many more, along with a range of adapted editions for younger readers. The first book has never been out of print in America, and its idea of children building a household out of what they find is one of the most durable openings in American children's fiction. It was written for readers of about seven to ten, and the vocabulary in the 1942 text is deliberately simple without ever sounding as if it were written down to anyone.