Her first book was her best picture book, and her last book was her most praised novel. She wrote about art and drew pictures about books. She is known as a humorist, but her books are often deeply serious in tone. She was a highly acclaimed artist who dreamed of winning the Caldecott Award (although her books were never named even as Honor Books), but she won the Newbery Medal for a book totally unlike any other which won that award. She was a creative artist who would have made a great financier. She survived a miserable childhood and lived a life often filled with pain, but she left a legacy of beauty, wit, and cheer in her books.
Ellen Raskin, whose early years were somber ones, was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on 13 March 1928. At age four, she recalled, she decided to become a musician and practiced hours every day until the piano was repossessed by the finance company. When she was seven, her parents, Sol and Margaret Goldfisch Raskin, headed with Ellen and her sister, Lila Ruth, for the golden streets of California; three months later the family returned to Milwaukee. Raskin said, "Those were hard times, the Depression years; they made me a humorist.
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