Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
| Phyllis Reynolds Naylor | |
|---|---|
Naylor in the chair where she writes the first two drafts of every book by hand
|
|
| Born |
Phyllis Reynolds January 4, 1933 Anderson, Indiana,US |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Spouse(s) | Rex Naylor |
| Children | Jeffery Naylor Michael Naylor |
| Awards |
Newbery Medal 1992 |
| Website | phyllisnaylor |
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (born January 4, 1933) is an American writer best known for children's and young adult fiction. Naylor is best known for her children's-novel quartet Shiloh (a 1992 Newbery Medal winner) and for her "Alice" book series, one of the most frequently challenged books of the last decade.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor was born in the U.S.A. She grew up during the Great Depression with her older sister Norma and younger brother John. She has said that she never felt poor, as her parents had a book collection and read stories aloud to her and her siblings until adolescence. Her favorite book as a child was Huckleberry Finn. She began writing her own stories when she was in elementary school. When she was 16 years old, a Sunday school teacher asked her to write a story for the church magazine. She wrote a baseball story named "Mike's Hero" and was paid $4.67 for it. She continued writing, even sending her stories to magazines such as Highlights, Seventeen, and Jack and Jill, receiving two years of rejection letters. Naylor graduated from Joliet Township High School in 1951 and from Joliet Junior College in 1953. When Naylor was 18 years old, she married her first husband and they soon moved to Chicago where she worked as a clinical secretary in a university hospital. Years later her husband began showing signs of severe mental illness, requiring her to seek out treatment for him all over the country. To support them, Naylor wrote and worked a series of jobs including assistant executive secretary, an elementary school teacher and eventually got a job as an editorial assistant for a magazine. He was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and with no hope of \
Settling in Maryland, Naylor decided to attend American University, graduating in 1963 with a BA degree. In 1960, Naylor married Rex Naylor, a speech pathologist whom she met at church. Naylor planned to work towards a master's degree in clinical psychology but decided to become a full-time author. Her first children's book was called The Galloping Goat and Other Stories and was published in 1965. Since then, Naylor has written an average of two books a year, many receiving special recognition by the American Library Association and the International Reading Association, and have also been selections for the Junior Literary Guild. In 1985 she received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for her 1984 novel Night Cry.
...
Wikipedia