The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal is awarded by the Association for Library Service to Children, part of the American Library Association. The award was first given to its namesake in 1954. The prize, a bronze medal, honors an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made, over a period of years, a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children.The award was given every five years between 1960 and 1980; it is now given every three years.

Click on the author’s name to see which of their books are owned by the Springfield-Greene County Library. Biographical excerpts are from Contemporary Authors, a Gale Literary Database.

2007 -- James Marshall (1942-1992)

The author and illustrator of the “ George and Martha” books, the “Fox” easy reader series, “ The Cut-Ups” and “ Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, James Marshall was a Caldecott honor winner in 1989. He also illustrated the “ Miss Nelson” books and “ The Stupids” series, written by Harry Allard.

2005 -- Laurence Yep (1948-)

The author of such award-winning novels as Dragonwings, Child of the Owl, and Dragon Steel, novelist and playwright Laurence Michael Yep is noted for penning fiction that brings the history and culture of Chinese Americans into realistic view, exchanging the exaggerated, stereotyped images of Dr. Fu Manchu and Charley Chan for portraits of the real-life men and women who have enriched the United States with their own labor and willingness to share their cultural heritage.

2003 -- Eric Carle (1929-)

Eric Carle is best known for his picture books for young children and his visual observations of the natural world encourage the imagination and often mirror the larger changes in a young child's development and experience. Critics have praised Carle's work by pointing out how his "keen knowledge and genuine appreciateion of nature undergird his vivid, often humorous, artwork, providing a deeply satisfying complexity." Since breaking into children's picture books by illustrating Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See, Carle has gone on to publish numerous books including The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Do You Want To Be My Friend?, The Tiny Seed and From Head to Toe.

2001 -- Milton Meltzer (1915-)

Milton Meltzer is best known for his comprehensive studies of oppressed peoples. Much of his subject matter--poverty, religion, crime, peace, discrimination, slavery--concerns injustices especially common to America. Many critics have praised Meltzer’s approach to these complex issues, noting that the author never “talks down” to his audience. Meltzer has been interested in social issues since his childhood. As a first-generation American, he was able to see firsthand the difficulties faced by many immigrants. He has established a reputation for effectively incorporating eyewitness accounts and personal documents, such as diaries, letters, and speeches, into his work. His books include: Brother Can You Spare a Dime?: The Great Depression, 1929-1933; Ten Queens: Portraits of Women in Power; All Times, All Peoples: A World History of Slavery; and The Jewish Americans: A History in Their Own Words, 1650-1950.

1998 -- Russell Freedman (1929-)

The respected author of more than 37 nonfiction books written for children and young adults. With subjects such as famous teenagers, animal behavior and American presidents, his books are noted for their understandable and entertaining presentation of often complex information. Freedman has been recognized as one of the more prolific and talented writers in his field. In 1988 he was awarded the prestigious Newbery Medal for his book Lincoln: A Photobiography, a factual history of Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States. Freedman was the first nonfiction author in 32 years to win the Newbery and one of only a handful of nonfiction authors to be honored with the medal since it was first presented in 1922.

1995 -- Virginia Hamilton (1936-)

Virginia Hamilton is one of the most prolific and influential authors of children’s books writing today. Not only have many of her works received awards such as the National Book Award, but her novel, M. C. Higgins, the Great, was the first work in history to win both the National Book Award and the Newbery Medal. Hamilton is recognized as a gifted and demanding storyteller. Ethel L. Heins, for example, writes in Horn Book: “Few writers of fiction for young people are as daring, inventive, and challenging to read--or to review--as Virginia Hamilton. Frankly making demands on her readers, she nevertheless expresses herself in a style essentially simple and concise.” Hamilton’s writing is a mix of realism, history, myth, and folklore, which, according to Horn Book contributor Paul Heins, “always [results in] some exterior manifestation--historical and personal--that she has examined in the light of her feelings and her intelligence.”

1992 -- Marcia Brown (1918-)

Since the 1940s, Marcia Brown has written and illustrated numerous children’s books, making her one of the most prolific and honored children’s authors in America. Her works have received three Caldecott Medals, six Caldecott honors and eleven American Library Association awards. In addition, she has received lifetime achievement awards from the University of Southern Mississippi and the Catholic Library Association. A respected artist, Brown is also known for her expertise in the art of woodcut, Chinese calligraphy, painting and children’s book illustration. Some of her works can be found in the Library of Congress and the Carnegie Institute.

1989 -- Elizabeth George Speare (1908-1995)

Speare is remembered for her historical children’s novels. She first began her career as an educator, teaching high school English in Massachusetts. By 1957, when Speare’s first novel was published, she had written numerous articles relating family memories and experiences which appeared in Better Homes and Gardens,Woman’s Day, and American Heritage magazines. In 1958, Spear published her best-known work, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, for which she received many awards, including the Newbery Medal from the American Library Association. Speare’s The Bronze Bow also received the Newbery Medal, while The Sign of the Beaver won the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction and a Christopher Award. Speare received other literary honors, culminating in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 1989, for her distinguished and enduring contribution to children’s literature. Her novels became classics for school children in the United States. Speare’s other works include Calico Captive and Life in Colonial America.

1986 -- Jean Fritz (1915-)

Jean Fritz is generally acknowledged as being one of the best authors of historical biographies written for young people. Although many of these biographies are studies of American Revolutionary War figures (including George Washington, Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock), Fritz has also published books on such people as Christopher Columbus, King George the Third, Pocahontas, St. Brendan the Navigator, and Thomas Jonathon &3147;Stonewall” Jackson. In 1978, Fritz was given the Children’s Book Guild’s Honor Award for Nonfiction paying tribute to the “body of her creative writing.”

1983 -- Maurice Sendak (1928-)

The first American to win a Hans Christian Andersen International Medal, Maurice Sendak has been a major figure in the evolution of children’s literature since the 1960s. With books like his Caldecott-winning Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak has led the way in trying to create more realistic child characters who are not the nostalgic models of innocence and sweetness that many authors portrayed in books before the 1960s. By creating drawings inspired by everything from nineteenth-century illustrators to twentieth-century cartoon artists, Sendak has also demonstrated an artistic adaptability that is nonconventional. Because of these deviations from what was once considered acceptable forms of writing and illustrating for children, Sendak has been the object of much controversy. But Jill P. May observes in the Journal of Popular Culture that “although Sendak’s works seem disgusting to some U.S. educators, librarians, and parents, his books are found in most public libraries and elementary school libraries.” And authorities such as writer and critic John Rowe Townsend, author of Written for Children: An Outline of English Language Children’s Literature, consider Sendak “the greatest creator of picture books in the hundred-odd years’ history of the form.”

1980 -- Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel, Theo LeSeig) (1904-1991)

Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known under his pseudonym “Dr. Seuss,” was “probably the best-loved and certainly the best-selling children’s book writer of all time,” wrote Robert Wilson of the New York Times Book Review. Seuss entertained several generations of young readers with his zany nonsense books. Speaking to Herbert Kupferberg of Parade, Seuss claimed: “Old men on crutches tell me, ‘I've been brought up on your books.’” “His rhythmic verse rivals Lewis Carroll’s,” stated Stefan Kanfer of Time, “and his freestyle drawing recalls the loony sketches of Edward Lear.” Because of his work in publishing books for young readers and for the many innovative children’s classics he wrote himself, Seuss “has had a tremendous impact,” Miles Corwin of the Los Angeles Times declared, “on children’s reading habits and the way reading is taught and approached in the school system.”

1975 -- Beverly Cleary (1916-)

Beverly Cleary’s humorous, realistic portrayal of American children’s lives has made her a favorite of young readers and their parents for over thirty years. Books were important to Cleary from an early age; her mother established the first lending library in the small town where the author was born. “It was in this dingy room filled with shabby leather-covered chairs and smelling of stale cigar smoke that I made the most magic of discoveries,” she recalls in Top of the News. “There were books for children!”

1970 -- E.B. White (1899-1985)

Few writers have achieved recognition in as many fields as did E. B. White. He was regarded as one of the finest essayists of the twentieth century; he was the author of two classics of children’s literature, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little; and his extensive contributions to the New Yorker were instrumental in making that magazine a success.

1965 -- Ruth Sawyer (1880-1970)

Ruth Sawyer was known as a teller of folktales, which she collected from around the world, and as a writer of stories about children from other cultures. Among her most popular books are the Caldecott Medal-winning The Christmas Anna Angel, about a Hungarian girl who yearns for a traditional Christmas celebration, and the Newbery Medal-winning Roller Skates, the story of a young girl who explores New York City.

1960 -- Clara Ingram Judson (1879-1960)

Clara Ingram Judson wrote several dozen children’s books and was particularly well known for works inspired by American history. These works include biographies of many American leaders and books that celebrate the diverse groups of people who immigrated to the United States from overseas. Judson’s writing career spanned nearly fifty years, and by the time of her death in 1960 more than six million copies of her books had been sold.

1954 -- Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957)

Recounting her girlhood experiences on the American frontier in her autobiographical novels, Laura Ingalls Wilder became one of the most loved and respected children’s writers of the twentieth century. Her homely tales of pioneer life sold millions of copies, remaining continuously in print after the first of them appeared in the 1930s. To the Depression era they offered reminders of another time, when people enduring hardship found joy in simple things like the sound of a fiddle and warm family relationships. Decades later Wilder’s characters and settings won over another generation in a long-running television series. An honest, unsentimental, and vivid combination of storytelling, history, and autobiography, Wilder’s books captured the maturing both of an individual and of a country.

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