I suspect you’re probably right since Anderson decided to finance the publication of “A Daughter of the North” three years later in order to make more money from book sales.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how that turned out. He’s silent in his journal about it.

I have to admit I’m as interested in these questions as I am in the ones you originally raised.

Then again, if you look at the $197 as a percentage of the average annual salary ($750 a year), it looks more like the equivalent of $12,000 today.

Not enough to live on, but a nice supplement to your other income.

On January 1913, Nephi Anderson recorded in his journal that his royalties for Added Upon, The Castle Builder, and Piney Ridge Cottage totaled $197 in 1912.

“Best yet,” he wrote.

I imagine the record sales had to do with the MIA endorsement.

In some ways, I also think PRC was an interesting choice for the MIA curriculum since it is one of Anderson’s least didactic works. It could be that it was selected because the main character–a young woman named Julia–has to decided between a member suitor and a non-member suitor. The text is very much about how a young person learns to make decisions based on spiritual promptings.

But, aside from this, it is relatively complex–for Anderson and early Mormon fiction–in the way it handles characters and the choices they make. There’s real psychological depth to Julia and the three other major characters in the novel. Not to mention a stinging critique of industrialization and urban Mormons in turn-of-the-century Salt Lake City.

I’d be interested to learn how MIA leaders at the time used the novel.