American novelist
Eleanor Estes (May 9, 1906 – July 15, 1988)[1] was an American children's writer and a children's librarian. Her book Ginger Pye, for which she also created illustrations,[2] won the Newbery Medal. Three of her books were Newbery Honor Winners, and one was awarded the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. Estes' books were based on her life in small-town Connecticut in the early 1900s.
Life
Eleanor Estes was born Eleanor Ruth Rosenfield in West Haven, Connecticut. She was the third child of father Louis Rosenfeld, a bookkeeper for a railway, and mother Caroline Gewecke Rosenfeld, a seamstress and story teller. Estes's father died when she was young and her mother's dressmaking provided for the family.[2]: 267 Eleanor Estes attributes her love of reading, children's literature, and storytelling to her parents' fondness for books and her mother's "inexhaustible supply of songs, stories, and anecdotes, with which she entertained us with while cooking dinner."[3] In 1923, after graduating from West Haven High School, she trained at the New Haven Free Library, and became a children's librarian there.[4]: 147
In 1931, Estes won the Caroline M. Hewins scholarship for children's librarians, which allowed her to study at the Pratt Institute library school in New York.[5] In 1932 she married fellow student Rice Estes. They both worked as librarians throughout New York, and he later became a professor of library science and the head of the Pratt Institute Library.[3][6] Estes worked as a children's librarian in various branches of the New York Public Library, until 1941.[3] Estes began writing when tuberculosis left her confined to her bed. Her best known fictional characters, the Moffats, live in Cranbury, Connecticut, which is Estes’ hometown of West Haven. She based the Moffats after her family, including patterning younger daughter Janey after herself, and basing Rufus on her brother, Teddy.[7]
The Esteses had one child, Helena, born in Los Angeles in 1948, where Rice Estes was assistant librarian at the University of Southern California. In 1952 they moved back east and worked as librarians. Estes also taught at the University of New Hampshire Writer's Conference.[8]
Eleanor Estes died July 15, 1988, in Hamden, Connecticut. Her papers are held at the University of Southern Mississippi,[6] University of Minnesota,[5] and the University of Connecticut.[9] She wrote 20 books.
The Hundred Dresses
Estes’s book The Hundred Dresses was a Newbery Honor Book in 1945. It spoke about the bullying of children based on their races and their nationalities. The book is about a young Polish girl named Wanda Petronski who is bullied by her classmates for her weird Polish name and the blue dress she wears every day. Wanda claims to have a hundred dresses at home and her classmates don’t believe her. After being pulled out of school by her father, Wanda wins a school art contest for her one hundred drawings of dresses. Her classmates felt regret about bullying her when they realized that it was their own faces drawn in the design of dresses by Wanda. Estes based the book on an incident from her own childhood, to atone for staying silent when a peer was bullied.[10][11]
Reception
According to reviewer Carolyn Shute, Estes had the "ability to distill the very essence of childhood."[14]: 319 Anita Silvey said she possessed a "rare gift for depicting everyday experiences from the fresh perspective of childhood."[15] Estes is primarily recognized as a writer of family stories, and as one who "shaped and broadened that subgenre's tradition", primarily through her "seemingly artless style".[4]: 147 Eleanor Cameron, in an article for The Horn Book Magazine, included Estes' Moffat books among "those that sit securely as classics in the realm of memorable literature".[16]
