Ruth Sawyer was the professional name of Ruth Sawyer Durand (August 5, 1880 - June 3, 1970), an American writer of children's books. She was born in Boston and raised in New York City. She studied folklore and storytelling at Columbia University, where she got a B.S. in 1904. Her first published work was The Primrose Ring in 1915, of which a movie was made in 1917 (starring Loretta Young). Her best-known book is Roller Skates, which won her the Newbery Medal in 1937. Like Roller Skates, a number of Sawyer's books are autobiographical accounts of her childhood and reveal an interesting perspective on American life at the end of the 19th century. These include The Year of Jubilo (1940) and Daddles, The Story of a Plain Hound-Dog (1964). As well as "Le berceau de Bo le Bossu"( a religious, Christmas folktale in Saint-Malo) Another tale Journey Cake Ho! written in 1953 and illustrated by Robert McCloskey was a Caledcott Honour Book. Sawyer also wrote non-autobiographical novels for children, such as The Enchanted Schoolhouse (1956; ill. Hugh Troy) and The Year of the Christmas Dragon (1960; ill. Hugh Troy), and a scholarly work, The Way of the Storyteller (1942). She published a number of collections of folktales, such as This Way To Christmas (1916) (which featured an illustration by a young Norman Rockwell) and My Spain: A Storyteller's Year of Collecting (1967). In 1965, she was awarded the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for her work.
Biography
Ruth Sawyer was born in 1880 of wealthy New York family. Her birth-name was Ruth Sawyer, and she published under this name after she was married. Upon the death of her father, a New York City importer, the family lost most of their wealth and their home in New York City. They were forced to move to their summer cottage in Maine and live off the land, an experience that Sawyer describes in her autobiographical children's novel, The Year of Jubilo. Her New York childhood is described in Roller Skates. The protagonist of these novels is "Lucinda Wyman", which was also the name of Ruth Sawyer's grandmother; but "Lucinda" was not Ruth's actual name. Sawyer travelled to Cuba in 1900, to teach storytelling to teachers organizing kindergartens for children orphaned during the Spanish-American War. She returned to New York to study folklore and storytelling at Columbia University. During two summers in 1905 and 1907, she worked in Ireland for the New York Sun and spent time in the countryside collecting Irish folk tales. Sawyer married Albert C. Durand, an eye doctor. The couple raised two children, Margaret (Peggy) and David, in Ithaca, New York. Peggy, a children's librarian, married Robert McCloskey, who later became a children's book author himself. David, an economist and statistician, was a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
References
Haviland, Virginia (1965). Ruth Sawyer. New York: H.Z. Walck. Betsy Gould Hearne (April 2000). "Ruth Sawyer: A Woman's Journey from Folklore to Children's Literature". The Lion and the Unicorn 24 (2): 279-307. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
External links
- The Primrose Ring, available at Project Gutenberg.
- The Ruth Sawyer Collection at the College of St. Catherine, St Paul, Minnesota
- 2001 Humanities Lecture: Storied Lives by Betsy Hearne, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
