From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Reading A View from Saturday touched my heart. I had grown up with kids like this. The notion of an Academic Bowl was so appealing that I wanted to slip back to my childhood, go to that school, and be on the team. Elaine Lobl Konigsburg told stories about real children, kids that many of us could side with, laugh with, cry with, and not feel alone.

Those two books won Newbery Awards. The books continue to be read by generations of kids. They’re good books.

I loved her “true” story in When I Was Your Age, Original Stories about Growing Up. I know middle school teachers who use that compilation of author’s “true” biographies each year because it engages kids with books and authors. Elaine Konigsburg’s childhood took place many years before mine but I felt as though she had lived at my house. I was an only child. She had sisters. Her sisters became my sisters.

Such was the power of this writer who pulled her readers firmly into the worlds she created, book after book after book. Ms. Konigsburg died on April 19, 2013. She was born on February 10, 1930. That means she shared her imagination with us for 83 years.

Ms. Konigsburg was the first in her family to get a college degree, which she earned in chemistry from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Although she began graduate school in chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, she moved to Jacksonville, Florida, with her husband David, where she taught science at the Bartram School for Girls. She had three children. When the third child entered school, Ms. Konigsburg wrote Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth in 1967. It won a Newbery Honor the same year that From the Mixed-Up Files won the Newbery Medal. Other books included A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, The Second Mrs. Giocanda, and The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place, each of them with a faithful following.

Thank you Ms. Konigsburg, for giving us characters and stories and notions that make us better people. Your books are well-loved.

“Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up and touch everything. If you never let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you.” — E.L. Konigsburg

Her stories pull you in from the first paragraph.

Drowned Ammet: “People may wonder how Mitt came to join in the Holand Sea Festival, carrying a bomb, and what he thought he was doing. Mitt wondered himself by the end.”

The Homeward Bounders: “Have you heard of the Flying Dutchman? No? Nor of the Wandering Jew? Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you about them in the right place; and about Helen and Joris, Adam and Konstam, and Vanessa, the sister Adam wanted to sell as a slave. They were all Homeward Bounders like me. And I’ll tell about Them too, who made us that way.”

Howl’s Moving Castle: “In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.”

What’s more, the fantasy in her books is original. They were stories unlike others I’d run across. Even when she was writing one of her loving send-ups of gamers or convention-goers, she found the trail of unexpected delight in each of her books. You may watch the movie Howl’s Moving Castle (Boston Globe Horn Book Honor), but it will not thrill you in the same way the book does. Ms. Wynne Jones’ sense of humor, her imagination, the way she finds the right word for the moment … these are not evident in the movie.

Different readers will name a different series of her books, or a single title, as their favorite. Whether it’s the Chrestomanci books (read Charmed Life first; it won the Guardian Medal) or the Dalemark Quartet (I enjoy Cart and Cwidder the most) or one of the Castle books (there are three) or the Derkholm books (Dark Lord of Derkholm is a fan favorite) or Hexwood or Enchanted Glass (most recently published and immensely enjoyable), you won’t find anything predictable in her storytelling.

Born in 1934, she was a child who experienced war in England. The oldest of three sisters, her parents were teachers. As Ms. Wynne Jones remembers her parents, they weren’t particularly loving, nor did they coddle their children. She felt that she and her sisters raised themselves to a great extent. Born in London, they moved to Wales, to avoid the war, then went to York, in the Lake District. The family lived in John Ruskin’s secretary’s house. The children of that house were models for the famous four in Amazons and Swallows—John, Susan, Titty, and Roger—and Diana Wynne Jones was reminded of this connection periodically at home and at school.

She was a curious reader, trying everything she could, both fiction and nonfiction, classical and current. At the age of eight, she knew quite clearly that she was going to be a writer. As she wrote, “It was not a decision, or even a revelation. It was more as if my future self had leaned back from the years ahead and quietly informed me what she was. In calm certainty, I went and told my parents. ‘You haven’t got it in you,’ my mother said. My father bellowed with laughter. He had a patriarch’s view of girls: they were not really meant to do anything.”

Eventually, in 1953, she attended St. Anne’s College, Oxford. There she had the good fortune to listen to lectures by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Shortly after graduation, she met John Burrows. “… instantly I knew I was going to marry this man. It was the same calm and absolute certainty that I had had when I was eight. And it rather irked me, because I hadn’t even looked at him properly and I didn’t know whether I liked him, let alone loved him.” She did. They married in 1956, lived for a short time in several English cities, and traveled for a bit to America where Mr. Burrows taught at Yale. In 1976, the couple moved to Bristol, where they lived up until the time of her death. They had three sons, all of whom are grown.

Diagnosed with lung cancer in 2009, she continued to write, planning out her next books. She died on March 26, 2011. Earwig and the Witch will be published later this year.

Diana Wynne Jones’ body of work is stout and hale. We, her readers, are grateful.

Steven attended Harvard University, from which he received a degree in American history and literature. He moved to London to take a job as editor at Chatto and Windus, a renowned publishing firm. Later, he worked as an editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston in New York. He reviewed books for, and was editor of, the Transatlantic Review.

The urge to write stories was strong, so Mr. Kroll retired from editing and worked for four years to become a published author. After many rejection letters, he met Margery Cuyler, who was an editor working at Holiday House. She took a shine to Steven Kroll and published a number of his books. Working with other editors and houses as well, Mr. Kroll wrote 96 books, including picture books, nonfiction, and young adult novels. Three more books are set to be published in the 2011-2012 season.

In 1997, Steven married Kathleen Beckett, a freelance writer whose specialties are travel, food, and style. They lived in New York City and Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Steven Kroll died from complications following elective surgery. He was 69 years old.

He was born on February 21, 1954, the fourth of 12 children born to a family living in Fresno, California, where they were migrant farm workers. Victor was driven to write, which bemused his brothers and sisters. He did well in school. In fact, in a 1996 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Martinez said that in high school his guidance counselor informed him that with his excellent grades and test scores, he should aim high and consider a career as a welder. He persisted and went to California State-Fresno. The poet Philip Levine encouraged him to try for the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He received it, and taught there for a while, but he resigned—he wanted to write. It was worth his while. He met his wife, Tina Alvarez, when she took his class at Stanford.

Martinez felt strongly about telling the truth with his writing. Sometimes that worked for publication, but often it did not. When he learned in 1996 that Parrot in the Oven was nominated for a National Book Award for young adult fiction, he was certain he didn’t have a chance. When the book was selected for this honor, he was cast in the limelight. The book also won a Pura Belpré Award from the American Library Association. The book is somewhat autobiographical, dealing with violence, gangs, and poverty. Today, it’s a part of the curriculum in many American high schools.

Victor Martinez died February 18, 2011. He died from a malignant tumor caused by exposure to pesticides when he worked in the fields as a young boy.

After graduating from Mount Holyoke in 1933, Ms. McElderry attended the Carnegie Library School in Pittsburgh, her hometown. She then went to work at the New York Public Library for Anne Carroll Moore, the first Superintendent of Children’s Work, cataloguing books and absorbing the literature. When Frances Clarke Sayers succeeded Ms. Moore, Sayers held a session in her office once a week to “educate the eye.” How I wish I could have been there! McElderry and a small group of women gathered after hours to “learn as much as we could about graphics and printing and illustrating.” She worked in London during World War II in the office of war intelligence. When she returned to New York in 1945, it was as head of the children’s department at Harcourt Brace. Her contemporaries were the other now-legendary editors in the field: Ursula Nordstrom, May Massee, Elizabeth Reilly, Alice Dalgliesh, Louise Seaman Bechtel … those we knew as the “ladies in white gloves.”

In 1972, Harcourt Brace dismissed her, saying that “the wave of the future has passed you by.” She moved to Atheneum, where she became the first children’s editor to have her own imprint, Margaret K. McElderry Books. The imprint still exists nearly 30 years later, although others have come and gone. Atheneum was purchased by Macmillan and it is now a part of Simon & Schuster, but the imprint continues to select, edit, and publish fine books for children.

This writer will always remember the opportunity she had to hear Ms. McElderry speak in 1998. A long-time fan of the books Margaret McElderry chose to publish, especially the fantasy books she edited during the 1970s, it was a chance to observe firsthand the gracious, lively, kind, and exceptionally smart woman who helped to change the face of children’s literature and mentored many who have followed. When Will Stanton asked Merriman Lyon, “You mean she was one of the Old Ones?” I’d like to think he was not only referring to Miss Greythorne, but also to Margaret McElderry. A true representative of the Light.

It’s up to us now.

With 21 books in 29 languages having sold more than 20 million copies, Jacques was a successful writer and he took great pleasure in his success. It allowed this once-poor young boy to do things he had never dreamed possible. The twenty-second, and final, volume in the Redwall series, The Rogue Crew, will be published in May by Penguin.

Although he loved to write from the age of 10, he spent a good deal of his life as a storyteller. On his delivery route as a milkman, Jacques was invited to tea at the Royal Wavertree School for the Blind. He volunteered to read to the children there. Becoming dissatisfied with all the stories “filled with angst,” he created his own, set in the forest in and around Redwall Abbey. For seven months, he handwrote an 800-page manuscript, which he eventually handed to his former English teacher for critique. Unbeknownst to Jacques, that teacher took the manuscript to several publishers.

Born in Liverpool on June 15, 1939, Brian Jacques lived there all his life. He went to St. John’s School in Kirkdale until he was 15, when he joined the merchant marine. He worked as a truck driver, a bobby, a firefighter, a playwright, and radio show host. “Jakestown,” his show, was on BBC Radio Merseyside for 20 years. But most of all, his fans are glad he became a writer. He became a patron at that Royal Wavertree School for the Blind, made possible by his ability to write books that so many people eagerly awaited reading. Of that, he was very proud.

He passed away in February 5, 2011.

Gertie was born on February 14, 1934, Valentine’s Day. She graduated from the College of St. Catherine in 1955 with a double major in library science and Spanish. For a number of years, she worked for the Minneapolis Public Library, first at the Longfellow branch and later assuming responsibility for the children’s section at the Franklin branch. Gertie married Chuck Geck and they moved to Brainerd in the mid-1960s, where Gertie was the librarian for the Brainerd State Hospital. In the late ‘60s, Gertie received her BS in education from St. Cloud State University. She worked as a librarian in elementary schools for the St. Cloud Public School District until her retirement in the early 1990s.

During her career with the St. Cloud public schools, Gertie also taught Spanish and developed the Explore Books program, a book discussion group for gifted and talented elementary school students. She conducted children’s literature reviews for the St. Cloud Media Center, assisting in book selection for the larger school library system.

In 1980, Chuck and Gertie Geck opened The Tree House Children’s Book Store in St. Cloud. Although they closed the retail store in 1995, they continued to operate the business as The Tree House Children’s Book Services. Throughout her career, Gertie was a frequent presenter on the topic of children’s literature and was an annual presenter at the St. Cloud State Children’s Literature Workshop.

The entire Charles and Gertie Geck family was awarded the Kay Sexton Award in 1991, honoring them for their years of contribution and dedication to children’s books.

In 1991, the dynamic husband and wife hosted the first annual Children’s Literature Book and Breakfast. They wondered whether they would succeed but, with attendance at 40, counting the authors and illustrators, they decided to try it again. Seventeen years later, it had become the hottest ticket in town, with 230 participants and 30 authors gathering in February to celebrate books and reading. The Breakfast involved the extended Geck family, including Chuck and Gertie’s children and their spouses, and their grandchildren. Gertie chose to officially retire in 2008, a decade after losing her beloved husband, Chuck.

It’s a long list of accomplishments, but anyone who knew Gertie loved her for her intelligence, sense of humor, enthusiasm, and her passion for books, basketball, and music. Gertie was active in her church and enjoyed singing in the choir. She had a heart as big as the sky, often sharing her delight in a sunset or a piece of jazz or an unusual book by sending a card or calling on the phone. She paid attention to the world and the people around her. She was one of a kind—the best kind.

You may be familiar with Tasha Tudor’s Mother Goose, a Caldecott Honor book in 1945, or her illustrated version of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1963), or her books about Corgiville, but at some time you have no doubt turned the pages of a book illustrated by Ms. Tudor. She was prolific, inventive, and had a sensibility about life that defined her books as well as her home and family.

Her lifestyle was as famous as her books. Her given name was Starling Burgess, but she was more comfortable with a nickname her father gave her and her mother’s maiden name, so she had her name legally changed to Tasha Tudor. Her parents divorced when she was nine years old. Rather than living with her artist mother in 1920s Greenwich Village, which was considered an improper environment for a child, she was sent to live with her mother’s friends in Redding, Connecticut. She often spent weekends with her mother in New York City.

Tasha Tudor married Thomas Leighton McCready, Jr., when she was 23 years old. The couple had four children, two boys and two girls. They moved to a house in New Hampshire that had no electricity or running water, but it was a very large house on a farm and the family raised livestock and pets, made their own food, knit their own sweaters, and sometimes wove their own cloth. Tasha Tudor enjoyed this life, returning to it again and again. In fact, she was quoted as saying that she believed she was the reincarnation of a sea captain’s wife who had lived in the early 1800s.

Her first book was published in 1938—Pumpkin Moonshine was purchased by Oxford University Press. It is still in print, as are many of Ms. Tudor’s books. She won a second Caldecott Honor for 1 is One in 1956. She was award the Regina Medal from the Catholic Library Association in 1971.

As Tasha Tudor and Family, her business created greeting cards, calendars, prints, plates, aprons, books, dolls, and quilts based on Ms. Tudor’s art.

Tasha Tudor was a woman of complex talents, experience, determination, and energy who leaves us with an astounding body of work that is treasured by her many readers.

A prolific author, she published 39 adult suspense novels, 14 books for young adults, 20 children’s mysteries, guides to writing, and many, many magazine stories. Her first novel was A Place for Ann, published in 1941 by Houghton Mifflin. It was about a group of worlds who start a business to show what they can do, eventually starting the House of Tomorrow. Her final novel was published in 1997, Amethyst Dreams, published by Crown. That means her publishing career spanned 56 years. She received the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement from the Mystery Writers of America in 1988.

Ms. Whitney was born in Yokohama, Japan, and lived her first fifteen years with her parents in Japan, China, and the Phillipines. In 1918, Ms. Whitney’s father died in China and Phyllis and her mother traveled to Berkeley, California, living there and later in San Antonio, Texas. Phyllis dreamed of being a dancer and her mother worked hard to make that dream come true. Ms. Whitney’s mother died in San Antonio and Phyllis went to live with her aunt in Chicago, where she graduated from high school and turned her attention to writing. Two of her mysteries for children won Edgar awards, Mystery of the Haunted Pool and Mystery of the Hidden Hand. Three more were nominated for that award, Secret of the Tiger’s Eye, Secret of the Missing Footprint, and Mystery of the Scowling Boy.

Phyllis Whitney died on pneumonia at the age of 104 on February 8, 2008.

Although I read many, many books from the time I learned to distinguish letters as words, it wasn’t until my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Rausch, read A Wrinkle in Time out loud to our class that I felt the true power that words could have. That book changed my life. It made me want to become a communicator in the way that Madeleine L’Engle reached people. She did this, not by writing for children, but by writing to tell the story she needed to tell. And she did this in a way that felt honest. L’Engle was often quoted as saying, “”In my dreams, I never have an age. I never write for any age group in mind. … When you underestimate your audience, you’re cutting yourself off from your best work.” Her readers felt that respect.

Born on November 29, 1918, Madeleine L’Engle shared her story with her readers in a number of books for children and adults, her Crosswicks Journals, and her reflections on life and faith. Raised by two parents who had professions in the arts, young Madeleine often felt neglected. She spent time in boarding school in Europe and on theater stages in America.

She had books published before A Wrinkle in Time, but it is the wondrous story of that book’s publication which is often told as a fireside story of inspiration to yet-unpublished authors. I have heard it said that the manuscript was rejected as many as twenty-six to forty times, depending on the story’s teller.

Her books were interconnected, characters in one book knowing or writing to characters in another book. This brought her readers closer into the community of her books, knowing we were just a step away from receiving a letter ourselves. I’ve always expected to meet Canon Tallis in my travels.

Although I own all of her books, it is Many Waters that supplies the treat of “The L’Engle Family Tree” on its endpapers. Here, readers can see visually how each of the characters in L’Engle’s fiction fit into the overall picture.

L’Engle published Two-Part Invention, about her marriage to actor Hugh Franklin at a time when my own marriage benefited from her thoughtful words.

My favorite book is The Arm of the Starfish, because it was the first time that I realized a book could be smart. I admire The Young Unicorns for its handling of tough subjects. Dragons in the Water helped me to understand that one could embrace knowledge in many fields. Perhaps that is one of the greatest gifts from Ms. L’Engle’s books: the knowledge that self can be as large and varied and complex as you want it to be.

Madeleine L’Engle was honored with a Newbery Medal, a National Humanities Medal, the Regina Medal, the Kerlan Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, and the USM Medallion, among numerous others. Perhaps best of all, she was honored by her legions of readers, hungry for each new novel.

Her books were fewer in the last decade, and often they were explorations of faith and family from a mature writer, but I could always maintain hope that a new book from Madeleine L’Engle would soon be announced. In fact, a new YA book will come out in 2008, entitled The Joys of Love. For this reader, a great sadness fills my heart, knowing that we will no longer hear the thoughts of one of this life’s most eloquent writers.