Jean Fritz
| Born |
November 16, 1915 Wuhan, China |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Writer |
| Language | English |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | Wheaton College |
| Period | 1954– |
| Genre | Children's novels, biography, memoir |
| Subject | American biography and history |
| Notable awards |
Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal 1986 |
| Spouse | Michael 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.
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.
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).
Her autobiography Homesick, My Own Story (1982) 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 Medal 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.
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