Howard Pyle Biography

Authors and Artists for Young Adults on Howard Pyle

Howard Pyle was a prolific author, editor, and illustrator, remembered for his adaptations of the Robin Hood story and Arthurian legends. He was also influential as a teacher of illustration; former students such as early twentieth-century artists N. C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish recalled him as a demanding yet generous and devoted master. Through his skill and his tutelage Pyle was largely responsible for establishing a new standard of excellence in turn-of-the-century American graphic art.

Pyle was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on March 5, 1853, to William Pyle, the owner of a leather business, and Margaret Churchman Painter Pyle. He recalled in the April 1912 Women's Home Companion that his childhood was a "bright and happy" one during which his mother instilled in him a love of books and illustrations, reading to him from adventure stories such as Robinson Crusoe and other classics like Pilgrim's Progress, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and The Arabian Nights. The lush gardens in which he played stimulated his imagination, and he aspired to become a storyteller before he could even read or write.

By his own recollection an indifferent student, Pyle attended the Friend's School in Wilmington and later the small private school of T. Clarkson Taylor. He resisted his parents' desire that he attend university, set instead on a career as an artist, and subsequently studied painting in Philadelphia with F. A. Van der Wielan. After three years under Van der Wielan, Pyle returned home to Wilmington and his father's leather business.

Pyle's first break as an artist came in 1876, when he wrote and illustrated a story about his visit to the Chincoteague Islands off the Maryland-Virginia coast. The piece, "Chincoteague: The Island of Ponies," was accepted by Scribner's Monthly magazine for its April 1877, issue. Encouraged by this success and by the urging of Roswell Smith, one of the owners of Scribner's, Pyle decided to move to New York.

Pyle spent an impoverished eighteen months in New York before his first important piece, "A Wreck in the Offing" was accepted by Harper's Weekly. This effort, for which he was paid seventy-five dollars, confirmed in Pyle's mind not only his life's career, but the future importance of illustration to the art world. Soon he left New York to return again to Wilmington, finding, as he wrote in a 1909 issue of Harper's Weekly, "the diversions in New York too many and attractive for sustained and serious effort." Back in Wilmington he settled into the work routine--shut in his studio from morning until nightfall--that made possible his prodigious output.

In 1883 Pyle saw published one of his best-known works, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire. He had first conceived of the project while in New York, hoping to sell stories and illustrations based on the famous outlaw to the juvenile magazine St. Nicholas. He approached the project with his customary care, extensively researching costumes, architectural styles, and settings; his main literary source was Joseph Ritson's 1795 collection of Robin Hood ballads. As was the case throughout his career, he created not just the stories, but the whole book: text, illustrations, and even a form of calligraphy featured in headings and captions. Pyle had been raised in a Quaker family, but he loved high adventure, and his Robin Hood stories are filled with excitement. Many of the episodes of the Robin Hood tales most vividly remembered by readers--Robin's contest on the log with Little John, for example, and his enlistment of Friar Tuck--were popularized by Pyle's version.

Earlier, in April 1881, Pyle married Anne Poole, a singer. They eventually had seven children; but tragedy struck the Pyle family in 1889. While the couple vacationed in Jamaica, their seven-year-old son, Sellers, died unexpectedly. The boy was buried before the Pyles could return home. In his grief Pyle wrote The Garden behind the Moon, a fairy-tale that is also a meditation on the necessity of accepting death.

Adding to the demands on his time posed by work and family, Pyle began teaching illustration in 1894. He taught first at Drexel Institute of Arts and Sciences in Philadelphia, but by the turn of the century had set up his own school in Wilmington. Pyle's students came away from their studies with vivid, fond memories of their teacher, whose course of study included enjoying the activities rural Delaware had to offer: hunting, bicycle riding, and evening walks. Pyle in his teaching stressed the dramatic--he required that his pupils write stories as well as illustrate them, and that they imaginatively insert themselves into any scene they were attempting to depict.

In 1903 Pyle suggested to the publisher Scribner's that he adapt a series of adventure tales from the legends of King Arthur, a saga based on a sixth-century English leader. Already in his career Pyle had written and illustrated two chivalric novels; Otto of the Silver Hand is a grim tale of life in the Middle Ages bearing little resemblance to the rousing adventures of Robin Hood; Men of Iron is a more straightforward adventure yarn set in the year 1400. Neither work was particularly successful. For his Arthur books Pyle drew background material from a variety of sources; his chief problem in retelling the legends was condensing the wealth of information into four volumes.

The series, beginning with The Story of King Arthur and His Knights and extending through The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur, is still enjoyed today, despite the difficult style Pyle used to emulate medieval speech. The author downplayed some of the legend's sexual themes, concentrating instead on adventure and the nobility of his chivalric heroes. He turns many episodes of his Arthur stories into homilies, stressing the higher virtues of a knight over his more violent qualities.

Pyle traveled to Europe in 1910, the year the last Arthur book was published. The trip was an opportunity to see firsthand the many famous paintings he had previously studied only in books. The works of the masters made a great impression on him, but his enjoyment was tragically cut short. He suffered an attack of renal colic in Italy and never fully recovered. He died in Florence in November 1911.

Pyle greatly influenced children's literature and the course of American graphic art. His vivid and exciting retellings of Anglo-Saxon myths have popularized them for American audiences for nearly a century. As an artist he approached his craft with skill and integrity, setting a high standard of quality for illustrations that audiences have admired for generations after his death.