Robert Lawson (author)

Robert Lawson (October 4, 1892 – May 27, 1957) was an American writer and illustrator of children's books. His work was widely admired, and he became the first, and so far only, person to be given both the Caldecott Medal, for They Were Strong and Good (1941), and a Newbery Award, for Rabbit Hill (1945).

Born in New York City, Lawson spent his early life in Montclair, New Jersey. Following high school, he studied art for three years under illustrator Howard Giles (an advocate of dynamic symmetry as conceived by Jay Hambidge) at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now Parsons School of Design), marrying fellow artist and illustrator Marie Abrams in 1922. His career as an illustrator began in 1914, when his illustration for a poem about the invasion of Belgium was published in Harper's Weekly. He went on to publish in other magazines, including the Ladies Home Journal, Everybody's Magazine, Century Magazine, Vogue, and Designer.

During World War I, Lawson was a member of the first U.S. Army camouflage unit (called the American Camouflage Corps), in connection with which he served in France with other artists, such as Barry Faulkner, Sherry Edmundson Fry, William Twigg-Smith and Kerr Eby (Behrens 2009). In his autobiography, Faulkner recalls that Lawson had a remarkable "sense of fantasy and humor", which made him especially valuable when the camoufleurs put on musical shows for the children of the French women who worked with them on camouflage (Faulkner 1957).

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