Jean Craighead George | Biography

Jean Craighead George was born in Washington, D.C., to an entomologist father, Frank C. Craighead, and a storytelling mother, Carolyn Johnson Craighead. George and her twin brothers, John and Frank, who are now ecologists, were raised in an atmosphere designed to foster an early acquaintanceship with nature. Birds and animals were allowed to share their living quarters, and the family made many field trips and nature excursions.

George earned a B.A. degree in 1941 from Pennsylvania State University, where she studied science, and English under the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke. After graduation she attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she studied art, and the University of Michigan. In 1944 she married John L. George. Together they strove to introduce their three children--Carolyn Laura, John Craighead, and Thomas Lothar--to nature in much the same way as her parents had their children. George's first six books, which she illustrated, were coauthored with her husband. These books, each of which characterizes a certain type of animal, are best represented by Dipper of Copper Creek (1956), which won the Aurianne Award in 1958. The book interweaves facts about the life cycle of the water ouzel with the tale of prospector Whispering Bill Smith and his grandson Doug's yearning for independence. Scientists at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory at Gothic, Colorado, shared their research findings with the Georges, who wrote the book on site. Chapter headings such as "The Nest on the Canyon Wall" and "The Ceremony of Farewell" suggest the drama of the life of the tiny bird living in a subalpine zone.

The couple divorced in 1963, but George and her children continued the family hobby of raising wild animals, eventually raising 173 wild pets, most of which were eventually returned to nature. As a reporter for the International News Service (1942-1944) and the Washington Post (1944-1946), as an artist and then art director for Pageant magazine (1946-1947) and staff writer (1969-1974) and roving editor (1974 to 1982) for Reader's Digest , George mastered her writing skills effectively while efficiently meeting deadlines. In 1968 she was named Penn State Woman of the Year. She lives in Chappaqua, New York, from where she ventures out in pursuit of subjects for articles and juvenile novels.

Jean Craighead George's books for children, with settings that range from Alaska to the Bahamian island of Bimini, meld accurate natural history with stories about adolescents and younger children. Family trips, research, and wild pets provided the bases for her books and her more than seventy magazine articles. Her timely plots usually involve a portion of the life cycle of both creature and maturing human child or adolescent as they interrelate. Humans often have nicknames, while animal characters often have names related either to their scientific genus or species or to their behavior. The Hole in the Tree (1957), George's first book written without her husband, documents the penetration of an old apple tree, initially by a bark beetle, with further enlargements of the beetle's hole by Old Stonehead, a downy woodpecker, and Giant Driller, a pileated woodpecker. The human characters, Scott and Paula Gordon, note that "a hole in a tree is not an easy thing to keep," for increasingly larger animals soon occupy it. By the end of the book it is inhabited by raccoons.

The same sentence--"The snow sprinkled out of the sky one day until the floor of the February woodland was as smooth and white as paper"--both introduces and concludes Snow Tracks (1958), in which creatures travel in search of food...
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