When Lenski and her family began to spend winters in the Southeastern United States during the early 1940s, she was struck by the differences between this part of the country and her familiar New England and Midwest. The first books in what would become her Regional series were inspired by her winter visits to the South, which led her to the conclusion that while American children could read about the lives of their contemporaries in other countries, there were no books available to introduce the children of various American regions to one another. During the winter of 1941-42, while she was staying in New Orleans, she became acquainted with children and their families in the village of Lafitte, near Bayou Barataria. The friends she made in the community and the stories they told her became an important part of "Bayou Suzette" (1943), the story of a Cajun (or, as Lenski said, "bayou-French") girl in the bayou country during the early twentieth century. The following winter Lenski visited Lakeland, Florida, where she again befriended local people, conducted interviews and read about the area's history, and observed daily life around her, including the children who participated in the strawberry harvest. The resulting book, "Strawberry Girl" (1945), told the story of a family from North Carolina who migrated to Florida at the turn of the twentieth century and their interactions with the region's "cracker" culture. By the time that "Strawberry Girl" won the Newbery Award in 1946, Lenski had begun to understand it, along with "Bayou Suzette" and her work in progress "Blue Ridge Billy", which about a musical boy living in the North Carolina mountains during the early twentieth century, as the beginning of a series of regional books representing a new direction in children's literature.