Esther Forbes

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Esther Forbes (June 28, 1891 - August 12, 1967) was an American novelist and children's writer who received the Pulitzer Prize,Newbery Medaland also the O.Henry Prize for short stories in 1915.

Forbes was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, the fifth of six children born to Harriette Merrifield and William Trowbridge Forbes. After attending school in Wisconsin, Forbes served as a member of the editorial staff at Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston. Her first novel, Oh Genteel Lady!, was published in 1926 and was made a selection by the then newly formed Book-of-the-Month Club. She married Albert Hoskins in 1926. They divorced in 1933.

By 1938 Forbes had published a number of books, and first received critical and public acclaim for her novel, A Mirror for Witches, which was produced in several other formats (e.g., theatrical) and has never been out of print. Forbes' 1942 biography Paul Revere and the World He Lived In put her even more firmly in the spotlight and subsequently brought her the Pulitzer Prize for History. Her novel Johnny Tremain (1943), about the life of a young apprentice in Boston, in the early 1770s, won the 1944 Newbery Medal and remains one of the most highly acclaimed books for young adults.

Forbes died in 1967, age 76.

[edit] Quotations

Most American heroes of the Revolutionary period are by now two men, the actual man and the romantic image. Some are even three men - the actual man, the image, and the de-bunked remains.

—Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, note 54.

[edit] Works

A Mirror for Witches (1928)
Miss Marvel (1935 historical about a Worcester family)
Paradise (1937)
The General's Lady (1938 historical novel about Bathsheba Spooner)
Paul Revere and the World He Lived In (1942 biography)
Johnny Tremain : A Novel for Young and Adult (1943 YA novel)
The Boston Book (1947 pictorial essay)
America's Paul Revere (1948 pictorial essay)
Rainbow on the Road (1954)
The Running of the Tide (1959)
unfinished and unpublished manuscript about witchcraft

[edit] Further reading

Jack Bales, Esther Forbes: A Bio-Bibliography of the Author of Johnny Tremain, Scarecrow Press, 1998.
Esther Forbes biography at "Worcester Area Writers", Worcester Polytechnic Institute Library