Eric P. Kelly

Eric Philbrook Kelly (March 16, 1884 – January 3, 1960) was an American journalist, academic and author of children's books. He was a professor of English at Dartmouth College and briefly a lecturer at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He won the 1929 Newbery Medal recognizing his first published book, The Trumpeter of Krakow, as the preceding year's most distinguished contribution to American children's literature.

Kelly was born in 1884 in Amesbury, Massachusetts. While a student at Dartmouth College (BA, 1906), Kelly was a member of the French club.

After "ten colorless, uneventful, and discouraging years working on newspapers", Kelly volunteered in 1918 to work with the welfare organisation Les Foyers du Soldat in Quentin, France. He found himself in charge of athletics and entertainment for 2,000 Polish soldiers in Haller's Army. In May 1919, Kelly was shipped across Germany to the newly recognised state of Poland in a closed boxcar along with the Polish troops. His new base was established in the old Napoleonic fortress of Modlin, near Warsaw. He wrote to his mother that "Warsaw is a beautiful city, reminds me in some ways of Denver."

During the 1919–1920 Polish–Soviet War, Kelly was posted at Chełm with Haller's Army on the Bug River River. In January 1921, Kelly returned to the US where he took a job as a teacher at Mercersburg Academy. During this period he wrote descriptions of his experience in Poland and warned against the dangers of Bolshevik propaganda. Six months later, he was hired by his alma mater, Dartmouth College, where he would teach for 33 years. In 1924, he married his wife Katherine but, in spite of his fame as a children’s author, did not have any children of his own.

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