Since then her lifework has had three often simultaneous thrusts--as a writer, as an editor for Ginn and Company, and as an instructor and lecturer in the field of children's literature. Phases of her writing career include the publication of ten works of realism and fantasy between 1938 and 1967, work with Ginn as advisory editor and coauthor of the Basic Readers Series from 1955 to 1962 and the 360 Reading Series from 1970 to 1973, and the publication of six books that retell Greek myths for younger readers between 1972 and 1976. She has come full circle back to the first phase with the publication in 1980 of a realistic horse story,
A Morgan for Melinda. Her teaching career includes positions as instructor at San Jose State College from 1940 to 1943 and again in 1951, visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1943 to 1945, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1947, and at the University of San Francisco in 1956.
Gates is perhaps best known as the author of Blue Willow (1940), which was selected as a Newbery Honor Book in 1941. Blue Willow, considered by some critics as the first social- or realistic-problem novel for children, was recognized both for its lasting literary merit and for its expansion of the range of subjects which could be explored in books for children.
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