Five Little Peppers and How They Grew was originally serialized in an 1880 edition of Wide Awake, a children's magazine. The publisher of the magazine, Daniel Lothrop, loved the Pepper stories so much that he published a hard-cover edition of the story -- and married the author in 1881. In 1883 the couple moved to historic Concord, Massachusetts, and resided in a house called the Wayside, which had previously been home to Nathaniel Hawthorne and also to Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women.