Eleanor Estes
| Eleanor Estes | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Eleanor Ruth Rosenfield May 9, 1906 West Haven, Connecticut |
| Died | July 15, 1988 (aged 82) Hamden, Connecticut |
| Occupation | Writer, illustrator, librarian |
| Education | Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science |
| Period | 1941–1988 |
| Genre | Children's literature |
| Notable works |
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| Notable awards |
Newbery Medal 1952 Caroline Hewins Scholarship for Children's Librarians Pratt Institute Alumni Medal 1968 |
Eleanor Estes (May 9, 1906 – July 15, 1988) was an American children's author and a children's librarian. Her book, Ginger Pye, which she also created illustrations for, 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.
Born Eleanor Ruth Rosenfield in West Haven, Connecticut, Estes was the third of four children. Her father, Louis Rosenfeld, was a bookkeeper for a railway; her mother, Caroline Gewecke Rosenfeld, was a seamstress and story teller. Her father died when Estes was young, and her mother's dressmaking provided for the family. Eleanor Estes attributes her love of reading, children's literature, and storytelling to her parent's fondness for books, and her mother's "inexhaustible supply of songs, stories, and anecdotes, with which she entertained us with while cooking dinner." In 1923, after graduating from West Haven High School, she trained at the New Haven Free Library, and became a children's librarian there.
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. 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. Estes worked as a children's librarian in various branches of the New York Public Library, until 1941. 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.
Eleanor based the story The Hundred Dresses on her real life experience as the girl who (unbeknownst to Peggy) received Peggy's hand-me-down dresses. She felt so guilty for not having defended the Wanda character in real life, that she wrote the story as both an exercise to assuage her guilt, and to encourage others to stand up against bullies.
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