Betty MacDonald put her heart and soul into her humorous memoir. The Egg and I, which became an unexpected 1947 bestseller. The film rights to this story about a young woman on a chicken farm in Washington state were purchased for a down payment of $100,000, a large sum at the time, with a percentage of movie profits to follow. However, soon after this financial windfall, MacDonald was sued for libel for $975,000 by the people of the small town, which was the basis of her book on the grounds that they felt their portrayal was a humiliation. Defending herself caused the author to spend considerable money and grief, though MacDonald finally won the case when she proved that the characters in the book were composites. MacDonald eventually moved from the Washington area she loved to California, but the whole episode had put a crack in her joy and she died of cancer at the age of forty-nine in 1958.
