Strawberry Girl

Last updated
Strawberry Girl
Strawberry Girl.jpg
Author Lois Lenski
IllustratorLois Lenski
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SeriesRegional Novels
GenreChildren's Realistic Fiction
Publisher J. B. Lippincott & Co.
Publication date
1945
Media typePrint
Pages194
Preceded byBayou Suzette 
Followed byJudy's Journey 

Strawberry Girl is a Newbery Medal winning novel written and illustrated by Lois Lenski. First published in 1945, this realistic fiction children's book, set among the "Crackers" of rural Florida, is one in Lenski's series of regional novels.

Contents

Background

Strawberry Girl is the second and best known of Lenski's series of regional books. She wrote them specifically to "present vivid, sympathetic pictures of the real life of different kinds of Americans". [1] :x Lenski approached each book seriously; moving into the communities; sketching the plants, animals, homes and especially the children. She lived with the people she wrote about and listened to their stories, bringing a realism that makes her books unique. [2] :457 The sketches she made become the basis for her illustrations for the books.

The term Cracker refers to the descendants of Anglo-Saxon pioneer settlers in early Florida. Lenski said of Strawberry Girl, "My material has been gathered personally from the Crackers themselves... I have visited in Cracker homes." She goes on to say that most of the incidents used in the book come from stories she was told by the people she met, though she may have altered them to fit the plot. [1]

Editions

Strawberry Girl is available in braille, large print, and on eBook, as well as CD and MP3. [3]

See also

Awards
Preceded by Newbery Medal recipient
1946
Succeeded by

Related Research Articles

<i>Stuart Little</i> 1945 childrens novel by E.B. White

Stuart Little is a 1945 American children's novel by E. B. White. It was White's first children's book, and it is now widely recognized as a classic in children's literature. Stuart Little was illustrated by the subsequently award-winning artist Garth Williams, also his first work for children.

<i>Little House on the Prairie</i> American series of childrens books (1932–1971) and media franchise

The Little House on the Prairie books comprise a series of American children's novels written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The stories are based on her childhood and adolescence in the American Midwest between 1870 and 1894. Eight of the novels were completed by Wilder, and published by Harper & Brothers in the 1930s and 1940s, during her lifetime. The name "Little House" appears in the first and third novels in the series, while the third is identically titled Little House on the Prairie. The second novel, meanwhile, was about her husband's childhood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katherine Applegate</span> American fiction writer

Katherine Alice Applegate, known professionally as K. A. Applegate or Katherine Applegate, is an American young adult and children's fiction writer, best known as the author of the Animorphs, Remnants, Everworld, and other book series. She won the 2013 Newbery Medal for her 2012 children's novel The One and Only Ivan. Applegate's most popular books are science fiction, fantasy, and adventure novels. She won the Best New Children's Book Series Award in 1997 in Publishers Weekly. Her book Home of the Brave has won several awards. She also wrote a chapter book series in 2008–09 called Roscoe Riley Rules.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings</span> American author

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an American writer who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie of the same name. The book was written before the concept of young adult fiction, but is now commonly included in teen-reading lists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Florida cracker</span> American pioneer settler

Florida crackers were colonial-era British, American pioneer settlers in what is now the U.S. state of Florida; the term is also applied to their descendants, to the present day, and their subculture among white Southerners. The first crackers arrived in 1763 after Spain traded Florida to Great Britain following the latter's victory over France in the Seven Years' War, though much of traditional Florida cracker folk culture dates to the 19th century.

<i>Because of Winn-Dixie</i> 2000 childrens novel written by Kate DiCamillo

Because of Winn-Dixie is a 2000 children's novel written by Kate DiCamillo. It was adapted as a 2005 family film directed by Wayne Wang, produced by Walden Media and Twentieth Century Fox, and starring AnnaSophia Robb as Opal Buloni.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lois Duncan</span> American writer, novelist, poet, and journalist

Lois Duncan Steinmetz, known as Lois Duncan, was an American writer, novelist, poet, and journalist. She is best known for her young-adult novels, and has been credited by historians as a pioneering figure in the development of young-adult fiction, particularly in the genres of horror, thriller, and suspense.

<i>Locked in Time</i> Book by Lois Duncan

Locked in Time is a 1985 suspense novel by Lois Duncan. The story centers around Nore, a seventeen-year-old girl who moves into a new home with her father and her new stepfamily. Soon after she meets her stepmother, stepbrother, and stepsister for the first time, Nore begins to suspect something is not quite right about her stepfamily. The author states that the novel explores some of the issues surrounding having eternal life. Duncan says she developed the idea for the novel when one of her daughters was thirteen years old and was having issues with her body image. Duncan mentions that her daughter was "taking everything out" on her, and she began to wonder what it would be like if her daughter never outgrew her adolescence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lois Lenski</span> American author and illustrator (1893–1974)

Lois Lenore Lenski Covey was a Newbery Medal-winning author and illustrator of picture books and children's literature. Beginning in 1927 with her first books, Skipping Village and Jack Horner's Pie: A Book of Nursery Rhymes, Lenski published 98 books, including several posthumously. Her work includes children's picture books and illustrated chapter books, songbooks, poetry, short stories, her 1972 autobiography, Journey into Childhood, and essays about books and children's literature. Her best-known bodies of work include the "Mr. Small" series of picture books (1934–62); her "Historical" series of novels, including the Newbery Honor-winning titles Phebe Fairchild: Her Book (1936) and Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison (1941); and her "Regional" series, including Newbery Medal-winning Strawberry Girl (1945) and Children's Book Award-winning Judy's Journey (1947).

The Betsy-Tacy books are a series of semi-autobiographical novels by American novelist and short-story writer Maud Hart Lovelace (1892-1980), which were originally published between 1940 and 1955 by the Thomas Y. Crowell Co. The books are now published by HarperCollins. The first four books were illustrated by Lois Lenski and the remainder by Vera Neville.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Williams Champney</span> American writer

Elizabeth "Lizzie" Williams Champney was an American author of novels and juvenile literature, as well as travel writing, most of which featured foreign locations. Champney's observations and experiences during her European travels were published in Harper's Magazine, and also in The Century Magazine. She published eighty or more articles in Harper's and Century, including a series on Portugal, and papers entitled "A Neglected Corner of Europe", and "In the Footsteps of Futuney and Regnault". After her return to the United States, Champney wrote fifteen books; novels, stories for juveniles, and historical works under cover of stories, mostly adapted to young people. Her novels were originally directed mainly at young girls, including the Witch Winnie series and the Vassar Girls Abroad series, but she later wrote romantic semi-fictional fables of castles, such as The Romance of the Feudal Chäteaux (1899). The novels included, Bourbon Lilies, and Romany and Rue. Of the juveniles, All Around a Palette, and Howling Wolf and His Trick Pony were the most popular. The historical series included Great Grandmother Girls in New France and in Mexico. Her husband, James Wells Champney, was an artist. Their summer home was in Deerfield, Massachusetts, while the winter residence was in New York.

Connie Rose Porter is an African-American writer of young-adult books, and a teacher of creative writing. Porter is best known for her contribution to the American Girl Collection Series as the author of the Addy books: six of her Addy books have gone on to sell more than 3 million copies. In addition, she published two novels with Houghton-Mifflin, All-Bright Court (1991), and Imani All Mine (1999).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cracker (term)</span> Racial epithet towards white people

Cracker, sometimes white cracker or cracka, is a derogatory word directed towards white people, used especially with regard to poor rural whites in the Southern United States. Although commonly a pejorative, it is also used in a neutral context, particularly in reference to a native of Florida or Georgia.

<i>Little House in the Big Woods</i> Childrens Novel

Little House in the Big Woods is an autobiographical children's novel written by Laura Ingalls Wilder and published by Harper in 1932. It was Wilder's first book published and it inaugurated her Little House series. It is based on memories of her early childhood in the Big Woods near Pepin, Wisconsin, in the early 1870s.

<i>On the Banks of Plum Creek</i> Laura Ingalls Wilder book published 1937

On the Banks of Plum Creek is an autobiographical children's novel written by Laura Ingalls Wilder and published in 1937, the fourth of nine books in her Little House series. It is based on a few years of her childhood when the Ingalls lived at Plum Creek near Walnut Grove, Minnesota, during the 1870s. The original dust jacket proclaimed, "The true story of an American pioneer family by the author of Little House in the Big Woods".

Barbara Euphan Todd was an English writer widely remembered for her ten books for children about a scarecrow called Worzel Gummidge. These were adapted for radio and television. The title story was chosen as the first in the new publisher's series Puffin Books.

<i>Blue Willow</i>

Blue Willow is a realistic children's fiction book by Doris Gates, published in 1940. Called the "juvenile Grapes of Wrath", it was named a Newbery Honor book in 1941. Written by a librarian who worked with migrant children in Fresno, California, this story of a migrant girl who longs for a permanent home was considered groundbreaking in its portrayal of contemporary working-class life in America.

<i>Dont Look Behind You</i> 1989 novel by Lois Duncan

Don't Look Behind You is a 1989 young adult thriller novel by Lois Duncan. It won a number of regional awards and was adapted into a television film in 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doris Gates</span> American childrens writer, librarian

Doris Gates was one of America's first writers of realistic children's fiction. Her novel Blue Willow, about the experiences of Janey Larkin, the ten-year-old daughter of a migrant farm worker in 1930s California, is a Newbery Honor book and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award winner. A librarian in Fresno, California, Gates lived and worked among the people described in her novels. She is also known for her collections of Greek mythology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Andrews Denison</span> American novelist

Mary Andrews Denison was an American novelist. She wrote over eighty novels which in total sold more than one million copies. Her writing style was typical of the dime novels popular in the mid-nineteenth century, featuring sweet-natured and noble heroines who triumph over evil.

References

  1. 1 2 Lenski, Lois (1973). Strawberry Girl. Foreword: HarperCollins.
  2. Arbuthnot, May Hill (1957). Children and Books, Third Edition. Scott, Foresman.
  3. "All editions for 'Strawberry girl'". WorldCat2. Retrieved 28 January 2015.