In 1923, eight-year-old Barbara Newhall Follett began writing The House Without Windows as a birthday present for her mother on the small portable typewriter she had been using since she was four years old. Though later that year her manuscript burned in a house fire, she rewrote the entire story and her father, Wilson Follett, an editor at Knopf, supervised its publication in 1927. In this extended fantasy, a young girl, Eepersip, runs away from home to live in idyllic Nature (successively, a meadow, the sea, and, finally, the mountains).