Little Vic (1951) received recognition as a favorite of young readers, who chose it to receive the William Allen White Children's Book Award in 1954. A versatile author, Gates writes with integrity, combining strength of story line with well-developed characters, authentic settings, and themes of consequence. Several titles are favorably cited in critical histories of children's literature and are also listed in selective bibliographies of significant twentieth-century works for children. Also worthy of note is the author's report in 1976 that her fan mail has not decreased. Her continuous residence in Carmel, California, since 1951 has provided a home base for her multifaceted life as author, editor, teacher, and guest lecturer.
Several concerns have informed and shaped Gates's writing. The first one involves theme. As she remarked to an interviewer for a Carmel newspaper, "All great fiction has an underlying theme concerned with a moral crisis. I think every one of my books does. There isn't any other excuse for writing a book, as I see it." Another idea which has shaped her development as a writer is the desire to awaken feelings of empathy in children for persons in society who are from different social, economic, or racial groups.
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