Jean Fritz

Jean Guttery Fritz (born November 16, 1915) is an American children's writer best known for American biography and history. She won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for her career contribution to American children's literature in 1986. She turned 100 in November 2015.<ref name"Centenary">Scales, Pat (2015-11-16). "Saying Thank You to Jean Fritz, Again!". Booklist. American Library Association. Retrieved 2015-11-20. </ref>

Early life

Fritz was born to American missionaries in Hankow, China, where she lived until she was twelve. She was an only child (when she was eleven, a sister Miriam died one week after birth). Growing up, she went to 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.

Works

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 (1958).