LOS ANGELES (AP — Who was P.L. Travers?
The easy answer is that she was the author of the Mary Poppins books that resulted in a beloved Disney movie and a Broadway musical.
But Travers played other roles during her 96 years. She was an actress in Australia.
She was a writer for newspapers and magazines in Australia, England and Ireland. She was a poet who became an intimate of the great Irish poets.
Oh yes, she also wrote propaganda for the United States during World War II.
Travers' remarkable life gets full-scale treatment in a biography, "Mary Poppins, She Wrote," by Valerie Lawson.
"In the 1980s, someone had told me, `Did you know that the author of "Mary Poppins" was born in Australia?' I filed that in the back of my mind, and I did a little work on it.
One day I realized I really had to tell this woman's story," said Lawson in an interview from her home in Sydney, Australia.
Lawson, who writes for the Sydney Herald, began her four-year pursuit of the elusive Travers in New Mexico, where Travers had lived in Taos and Santa Fe. Then it was on to Washington, D.
C., where Travers met with President Roosevelt during the war and worked for the U.S.
propaganda office.
Next came New York, where Travers and her young, adopted son lived during the war, followed by Massachusetts, where she had been a writer in residence at Smith College and Radcliffe College. Lawson also did intensive research in England and Ireland.
Travers was born Helen Lyndon Goff on Aug. 9, 1899, in Maryborough, Australia. Her Irish father was a bank employee and a drinker.
Lyndon, as she was called, left school in her teens to go on the stage, a move that shocked her staid Scottish mother. The girl rose from walk-ons to leading roles, changing her name to the more theatrical Pamela Lyndon Travers, the latter her father's first name.
As her stage career flourished, Travers suddenly quit to become a writer.
"She knew what her father had taught her — that she came from a family of great Irish literary people," Lawson said. (Story Continues On Next Page..
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