Edward Eager

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Edward McMaken Eager (1911 – October 23, 1964) was an American author who made a distinct contribution to children's literature by introducing a theme of magic into the lives of ordinary children.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Eager was born in and grew up in Toledo, Ohio and attended Harvard University. He was a childhood fan of L. Frank Baum's Oz series, and started writing children's books when he could not find stories he wanted to read to his own young son. In his books, Eager often acknowledges his debt to E. Nesbit, whom he thought of as the best children's author of all time. A well-known lyricist and playwright, Eager died in 1964 at the age of fifty-three.

[edit] Theatrical Works

List may be incomplete

Sing Out, Sweet Land! (1944), "a salute to American folk and popular music". With Elie Siegmeister, wrote three new numbers for the show.

Dream With Music (1944), a "musical fantasy" in which a soap-opera writer dreams that she is Scheherazade in old Baghdad, where her real life acquaintances turn up as Aladdin, the Sultan, etc. Wrote lyrics to music from Schubert, Beethoven, Saint-Saens, Weber, Chopin, Wagner, Haydn and Foster as culled by Clay Warnick. Balanchine choreographed.

Beachcomber Club Revue of 1946, Books & Lyrics by Edward Eager; Music by J Fred Coots (1946)

The Liar, New Musical Comedy, Lyrics by Edward Eager; Music by John Mundy (1950)

NBC's The Adventures of Marco Polo April 14, 1956 Music: Clay Warnick & Mel Pahl Lyrics: Edward Eager Book: William Friedberg & Neil Simon Cast: Alfred Drake, Doretta Morrow Those who originally led Broadway's Kismet starred in Polo, with the score contrived around themes by Rimsky-Korsakov. The story was lightly suggested by the actual exploits of the guy who opened China to the West. This production did well, and Columbia released an LP of the score.

CBS Radio Workshop May 4, 1956 The Toledo War (An Operatic Parlor Piece) Libretto by Edward Eager, Music by David Brookman (From credits on mp3 recording of episode.)

NBC's Holiday June 9, 1956 Music: loosely adapted from Johann Strauss Lyrics: Edward Eager Cast: Doretta Morrow, Keith Andes, Kitty Carlisle, Bambi Lynn, Tammy Grimes, George S. Irving, Jaques D'Amboise Loosely organized around Elmer Rice's play The Grand Tour, the story told of a New England schoolteacher who fell for embezzling banker during a trip to Europe. In the end of the musical she uses family monies to cover his misdoings, an odd resolution even by the looser standards of modern ethics.

NBC Opera Theater, mentioned in various places as ongoing, Lyricist, 1950--1963

[edit] Literature

Books:

  • Mouse Manor (1952)
  • Playing Possum (1955)
  • Half Magic (1954)
  • Knight's Castle (1956)
  • Magic By the Lake (1957)
  • The Time Garden (1958)
  • Magic Or Not? (1959)
  • The Well-Wishers (1960)
  • Seven-Day Magic (1962)

Collection of all seven Magic stories:

  • Edward Eager's Tales of Magic (omnibus) (2000)

[edit] Book Descriptions

Half Magic

A dull summer is improved when Mark, Katharine, Jane and Martha find a magic talisman, which resembles a U.S. nickel. But this particular magical money is only half magic--it cuts a wish in half and grants half of it. This causes wonderful/magical difficulty. They meet Sir Launcelot, end up with a half-talking cat, get almost kidnapped in the Sahara desert, and start their mom on a new relationship. This book is full of adventure and suspense.

Magic by the Lake

Here are the further adventures of Martha, Jane, Mark, and Katharine from Half-Magic. After racing up a hill Martha sees a magical lake and new adventures on their summer vacation where they go to a lake on a very weird road. They are stranded on a desert island, visit Ali-Baba's cave, and end up rescued by some children we see in the next book.

Half Magic and Magic by the Lake take place in the 1920s, earlier than Eager's other novels.

Knight's Castle

Martha's children: Roger and Ann, and their Aunt Katharine's children, Eliza and Jack, find that the combination of a toy castle, the story Ivanhoe, and a little magic can build another wonderful series of adventures. A running theme in Eager's novels is his many references to the novels of E. Nesbit; Knight's Castle pays explicit tribute to Nesbit's The Magic City, and also makes an explicit reference to the cartoons of Charles Addams. (Half Magic includes a reference to a short story by Saki.)

The Time Garden

Eliza, Jack, Roger, and Ann find an herb garden where thyme grows, which lets them travel through time (until the thyme is ripe). On one adventure they rescue their mothers, aunt Jane and uncle Mark who are on a magical adventure as children. This gives an alternate view of one of the adventures in Magic by the Lake.

Magic or Not?

Laura, James and their wonderful new neighbors, Kip and Lydia wish up some summer adventures when the well in their new yard is more than they imagined.

Although all of Eager's other novels for children depict what are clearly adventures in supernatural magic, Magic or Not and its sequel The Well-Wishers are different in tone from his other books, because all of the "magical" events in these two novels are described ambiguously, with clues to permit possible non-supernatural explanations.

The Well-Wishers

The children return to the magic well from Magic or Not for another unpredictable series of adventures which might (or might not) be genuine magic.

Seven-Day Magic

Barnaby, John, Susan, Abbie and Fredericka check out a tattered book from the library for seven days. Oddly, it carefully and correctly records every word they say. Soon they find that it not only records events, but creates new magical adventures.

Seven-Day Magic is Eager's only stand-alone novel: the only one featuring children who do not appear in at least one other of his books. It does, however, speak of his book Half Magic by name, and has a chapter where the children visit the very end of Half Magic and what might have happened afterwards.

[edit] Review

[The following review is reprinted with permission from Notes from the Windowsill, an electronic journal of book reviews. Copyright 1998 Wendy E. Betts. Reproduction for personal and non-profit use is permitted only if this copyright notice is retained. Any other reproduction is prohibited without permission. Mail editor@windowsill.net with comments or questions.]

April 1999, Volume 7 No. 4 Half Magic; Magic By the Lake; Knight's Castle; The Time Garden by Edward Eager. Illustrated by N.M. Bodecker. Harcourt Brace, 1954; 1957; 1956; 1958; 1999 (0-15-202069-1; 0-15-202077-2; 0-15-202074-8; 0-15-202075-6) $17.00; (0-15-202068-3; 0-15-202076-4; 0-15-202073-X; 0-15-202070-5) $6.00 pb (reprinted in part from The WEB: Celebrating Children's Literature)

I've never agreed with the argument that children only like books about people like themselves. What on earth is the point of reading if it never offers you anything new? But children do have a need to empathize with the characters they're reading about, and when I was a child, that empathy was most strongly created by characters who also loved to read. Whenever I read about people who didn't like books, I simply couldn't understand why anyone would bother to create them. Books about book lovers were always good – at least when they were created by a genuinely book-loving author – because no matter what else the book was about, I always had that bond with the characters.

No children's book author could be as genuinely book-loving as Edward Eager, and he created the best book-loving families around. Instead of writing for the lowest common dominator of potential readers, Eager's books were always written for the highest, with a beautiful faith that has been amply justified over the years. He wasn't always a great writer – of his seven books, four are at least somewhat lackluster – but his books never pander. It makes for wonderful reading.

Consider this passage from Half Magic: "`This,' said Katherine, `is what I would call a tulgey wood.' `Don't!' cried Martha. `Suppose something came whiffling through it!'"

Of course it's great fun to recognize the allusion, but even if you don't, you can appreciate the atmosphere it creates. And that's only one of the more obvious literary references. The books are scattered throughout with quotes, paraphrases, and allusions; he essentially created a whole childhood literary language, much as Wodehouse did in the "Jeeves" books.

Sharing this kind of language with Eager's characters creates a bond of intimacy between the reader and the books; you feel as if you belonged with those children, that you would like to know them. And it also creates a bond between the characters themselves, which is them feature groups of children of different ages, sometimes from more than one family, and they are all perfectly happy to play together, because books give them a common culture. In Seven-Day Magic, the most deliberately literary of Eager's books, a group of five children walk home from the library together and the youngest reads about Ozma's birthday party from The Road to Oz, "the way she almost always did. The others never minded listening to this once again. It took them back to their own happy, carefree, innocent childhood." This is a joke, of course, since the others aren't that much older, but the real point is that they love it as much as she does. It's not that age is never an issue – Martha, the youngest in Half Magic, sometimes whines and has to be put under the seat at the movies – but that they have so much in common, age is not the insurmountable burden it is often made out to be for children.

As fantasy, most of Eager's books are too derivative to surpass the works of the person he most strove to emulate — E. Nesbit — but as family stories, they are wonderfully comfortable and fun, because you feel like the children really care about each other and enjoy being together.

This intrinsic core of Eager's work, a theme of children united by the love of books, imaginative play, and a mutual culture based on reading, is increasingly hard to find in modern books. So thank goodness his books are still around. This reprinting includes four related titles, which are linked to each other in an ingenious and delightful way that I won't spoil by revealing here; although the quartet includes what is arguably his worst book (The Time Garden) as well as his best (Knight's Castle), once you've read one, you'll want to read them all. Longtime fans will be happy to see that N. M. Bodecker's wry line drawings are still included; the series now has feisty new covers by Quentin Blake, a vast improvement over some very dull previous editions. * (8 & up)

[edit] References

[edit] Citations

CBS Radio Workshop May 4, 1956 The Toledo War is out of copyright and generally available as an MP3. Eager is cited in the closing credits. I am currently creating a set of Old Time Radio Author Logs at OTR TNT and these logs will be the only location for the information I could find except the episode itself. Who the heck am I, anyhow?


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