Editing Beautiful Joe (section)

==The real Beautiful Joe==
The real Beautiful Joe was an [[Airedale terrier|Airedale-type]] dog. He was medium-sized, brown, and described as likely being part [[bull terrier]] and part [[fox terrier]]. He was also described as a [[Mixed-breed dog|mongrel]], a cur, and a mutt. He was originally owned by a local [[Meaford, Ontario|Meaford]] man, who cruelly abused the dog to the point of near death, and even cut off his [[ears]] and [[tail]]. Walter Moore, father of Louise Moore, rescued the dog in 1890, from what likely would have been a violent and painful death. In 1892, [[Margaret Marshall Saunders]] (1861&ndash;1947), first learned about Beautiful Joe when she visited her brother and his wife, Louise Moore. Saunders was so touched by Joe's story that she wrote a [[novel]]-length, [[fictional]]ized, [[autobiographical]] version of it, entitled ''Beautiful Joe''. Margaret Saunders relocated the story to a small town in [[Maine]] and changed the family's name from Moore to Morris to win a literary contest sponsored by the American Humane Education Society. The book was first [[publish]]ed in 1893. By 1900, over 800,000 copies sold in the U.S., 40,000 in Canada and 100,000 in the United Kingdom.

Saunders chose to write ''Beautiful Joe'' as an "[[autobiography]]" and tell the story from Beautiful Joe's viewpoint, and in her imagined version of Beautiful Joe's own words. While it was not the first book to tell a story from an animal's viewpoint – ''[[Black Beauty]]'' by [[Anna Sewell]] was already on its way to becoming classic literature by then – it was still an uncommon narrative device. This unusual viewpoint allowed the reader into Beautiful Joe's mind, and inarguably led the reader to feel more sympathy toward the [[narrator]] than if the material had been presented in a straightforward and documentative manner. Also, Saunders believed that she would not be taken seriously as a writer using the obviously female name Margaret Saunders, so she wrote using the variant name Marshall Saunders.