The Cradle of the Deep

A young adult novel written as memoir, this is an entertaining account of a girl raised at sea. For this reader, the book was one of those happy "library sale" discoveries. Kurt Weise's illustrations are charming, especially the wonderful nautical map of the author's adventures that form the endpapers. Sadly my edition lacks a dust jacket. Inscribed as a gift "to Elizabeth from Uncle Carl, May 1929," my copy also bears several nicks that indicate an long voyage before beaching upon my shelves. (Rosemary)

About the author:

Joan Lowell (born Helen Wagner; November 23, 1902 - November 7, 1967) was a movie actress of the silent film era from Berkeley, California. Lowell published a sensational autobiography, which turned out to be fictionalized.

In 1929, Joan Lowell wrote an autobiography, Cradle of the Deep, published by Simon & Schuster, in which she claimed that her seafaring father took her aboard his ship, the Minnie A. Caine, at the age of three months when she was suffering from malnutrition and nursed her back to health. She also claimed that she lived on the ship, with its all-male crew, until she was 17, during which time she became skilled in the art of seamanship and once harpooned a whale by herself. She claimed that the ship ultimately burned and sank off Australia, and that she swam three miles to safety with a family of kittens clinging by their claws to her back. In fact, the autobiography was a fabrication; Lowell had been on the ship, which remained safely in California, for only 15 months. The book was a sensational best seller until it was exposed as pure invention.

Cradle of the Deep was later parodied by Corey Ford in his book Salt Water Taffy, in which Lowell abandons the sinking ship (which had previously sunk several times before, "very badly") and swims to safety with her manuscript.

Later in 1929, Lowell's book about growing up at sea was exposed as a fabrication when her former neighbors in Berkeley were interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle. Simon & Schuster had to reclassify her book as fiction and offer a refund for returns. Despite all newspaper revelations and ensuing controversy, the book continued to sell well.

In an interview, Lowell commented on the fabrication charges as follows: "Eighty per cent of it was true and the rest I colored up. I made some changes to protect people and the rest to make it better reading. That's an author's privilege." (wikipedia.org)