As Elsie and her family, including newborn twin granddaughters, celebrate her fiftieth birthday, Max and Lulu and their father travel in the West, where they commemorate the Fourth of July and Lulu learns more about obedience.
Penned from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, Martha Finley's original Elsie Dinsmore books were the most popular books for young girls of their time. The first title of the series, Elsie Dinsmore, was painstakingly written over several years, and when it became an overnight success, her young readers demanded more of Elsie's adventures. Finley and her publisher decided to expand the book into a series of six titles. However, demand for more of Elsie, its endearing heroine, was so strong that the series eventually reached twenty-eight titles. Elsie Dinsmore outsold every juvenile book of the era, with the exception of Little Women.