Elizabeth Enright
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Elizabeth Enright (September 17, 1909 — June 8, 1968) was an American children's author and illustrator. She was born in Oak Park, Illinois. Her father, Walter J. Enright, was a political cartoonist; her mother, Maginel Wright Enright, was a magazine illustrator and the sister of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Enright studied at the Art Students League of New York in 1927-28, and at the Parsons School of Design. Like her mother, Enright began a career in illustration for magazines and children's books; she illustrated Marion King's Kees in 1930, and Nellie Marie Rowe's The Crystal Locket in 1935. As her career progressed she shifted her focus primarily to writing: she wrote and illustrated children's books in the 1930s and '40s, though after 1951 her children's books were illustrated by other artists.[1] She was awarded both the Newbery Medal, for Thimble Summer in 1939, and the Newbery Honor, for Gone-Away Lake in 1958. She reviewed children's literature for The New York Times.
Thimble Summer, her Newbery Medal book, draws upon her summers spent on Frank Lloyd Wright's farm in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and incorporates family background from her mother and grandmother. Gone-Away Lake received the New York Herald Tribune's Children's Spring Book Festival Award in 1957, in addition to the 1958 Newbery Honor. In 1963 the American Library Association named Gone-Away Lake as the U. S. nominee for the international Hans Christian Anderson Award. Tatsinda was an Honor Book in the 1963 New York Herald Tribune's Children's Spring Book Festival.
Enright also wrote short stories for adult readers, published in The New Yorker, The Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, The Yale Review, Harper's Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post. Her stories were reprinted in the anthologies The Best American Short Stories (in 1951 and 1952) and O. Henry Prize Stories (in 1946, 1949, 1950, and 1960), and collected in The Maple Three and Other Stories (1947), The Moment Before the Rain (1951), and The Riddle of the Fly (1959).
Elizabeth Enright married Robert Gilham on April 24, 1930; they had two sons. She taught creative writing at Barnard College from 1960 to 1962. In 1996, Enright was awarded an honorary LLD degree by Nasson College.
Elizabeth Enright died in her home in Wainscott, Long Island in 1968. She is buried near Spring Green in the Wyoming Valley region of Wisconsin.
[edit] Children's Books By Elizabeth Enright
- Kintu: A Congo Adventure, 1937
- Thimble Summer, 1938 (Ages 9-12)
- The Sea Is All Around, 1940
- The Saturdays, 1941
- The Four-Story Mistake, 1942
- Then There Were Five, 1944 (Ages 9-12)
- Christmas Tree for Lydia, 1951 (Baby-Pre-school)
- Spider Web for Two: A Melendy Maze, 1951 (Ages 9-12)
- Gone-Away Lake, 1957 (Ages 9-12)
- Return to Gone-Away, 1961
- Tatsinda, 1963 (Ages 4-8)
- Zeee, 1965 (Ages 4-8)
[edit] Collections of Short Stories for Adults By Elizabeth Enright
- Borrowed Summer and Other Stories, 1946
- The Moment Before the Rain, 1955
- The Riddle of the Fly and Other Stories, 1959
- Doublefields: Memories and Stories, 1966
[edit] Notes
- ^ The fist edition of Gone-Away Lake was illustrated by Joe and Beth Krush; the first editions of Tatsinda and Zeee were illustrated by Irene Haas. Many foreign editions of Enright's books have been published with illustrations by other artists.
