Jean Fritz


Jean Guttery Fritz was an American children's writer best known for American biography and history. She won the Children's Legacy Literature Award for her career contribution to American children's literature in 1986. She turned 100 in November 2015.

Early life

Fritz was born to American Presbyterian missionaries Arthur Minton Guttery and the former Myrtle Chaney in Hankow, China, where she lived until she was twelve.
Growing up, she attended a British school and kept a journal about her days in China with Lin Nai-Nai, her amah. The family emigrated to the United States when she was in the eighth grade.
She graduated from Wheaton College in Massachusetts in 1937 and married Michael Fritz in 1941. They had two children, David and Andrea.

Career

Fritz's writing career started with the publication of several short stories in Humpty Dumpty magazine early in the 1950s. Her first book was published in 1954, Bunny Hopwell's First Spring, followed in 1955 by 121 Pudding Street, a work based on her own children. She often wrote westerns and other stories of frontier America because her father told her stories of American heroes as she was growing up. Her first historical novel for children was The Cabin Faced West. Her autobiography Homesick, My Own Story won a National Book Award for Young People's Literature in the Children's Fiction category and was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal.
The latter American Library Association award recognizes the year's best American children's book but almost always goes to fiction. Later she won two annual Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards for children's nonfiction. In 1986, she received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award from the ALA, which recognizes a living author or illustrator, whose books, published in the United States, have made "a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children". At the time it was awarded every three years. That year she was also U.S. nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition available to creators of children's books.

Selected awards

New York Times outstanding book of the year citations:
1983 – Newbery Honor Award, National Book Award, and Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor book,all for Homesick: My Own Story.
1989 – Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, Orbis Pictus Award, National Council of English Teachers, for 1986 The Great Little Madison

Works

Autobiography