Further Readings About the Author
Personal Information: Family: Born October 5, 1928, in Memphis, TN; died of an aneurism November 19, 1974 in New Milford, CT; daughter of Millsaps (an attorney and government official) and Louise (Perkins) Fitzhugh. Education: Attended Southwestern College, Florida Southern College, Bard College, and New York University School of Education, Annandale-on-Hudson; studied painting at Art Students League, Bologna, Italy, and Cooper Union. Avocational Interests: Played the flute, tennis, dancing.
Career: Author, illustrator, and artist. Oil paintings exhibited at various galleries, including Banfer Gallery, New York, NY, 1963.
Awards:
New York Times Outstanding Books of the Year citation, 1964, American Library Association Notable Book citation, and Sequoyah Award, 1967, both for Harriet the Spy; New York Times Choice of Best Illustrated Books of the Year citation, 1969, and Brooklyn Art Books for Children citation, both for Bang, Bang, You're Dead; award, Children's Book Bulletin, 1976, for Nobody's Family Is Going to Change; Children's Rights Workshop Other award, 1976; Emmy award for children's entertainment special, 1979, for The Tap Dance Kid (based on Nobody's Family Is Going to Change).
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
FOR CHILDREN; SELF-ILLUSTRATED
Harriet the Spy, Harper, 1964.
The Long Secret, Harper, 1965.
(With Sandra Scoppettone) Bang, Bang, You're Dead (picture book), Harper, 1969.
Nobody's Family Is Going to Change, Farrar, Straus, 1974.
I Am Five (picture book), Delacorte, 1978.
Sport, Delacorte, 1979.
I Am Three (picture book), illustrations by Susanna Natti, Delacorte, 1982.
I Am Four (picture book), illustrations by Susan Bonners, Delacorte, 1982.
I Know Everything about John and He Knows Everything about Me, illustrated by Lillian Hoban, Doubleday, 1993.
OTHER:
Also author and illustrator of picture book My Friend John; illustrator of book for children by Scoppettone, Suzuki Beane, Doubleday, 1961. Author of text for I Am Six. Also author of plays and adult novels.
Media Adaptations: Nobody's Family Is Going to Change was adapted for television asThe Tap Dance Kidand broadcast on NBC-TV's "Special Treat" series, 1978; also produced as a play on Broadway at Broadhurst Theatre, December 21, 1983. Book of The Tap Dance Kid by Charles Blackwell, music by Henry Krieger, lyrics by Robert Lorick, S. French (New York City), 1988. Harriet the Spy was adapted as a film that was released in 1996.
Sidelights
Despite her career as an author of children's books, Louise Fitzhugh's own childhood was not particularly happy or carefree. Although her father was a wealthy man with an important position in state government, she was eager to leave home. As Ursula Nordstrom, former editorial director of Harper junior books, remembered in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "[S]he got out of the South as soon as she could, came north, went to Bard College, and concentrated on losing every single trace of her southern accent--and prejudices. She attended numerous schools in addition to Bard. . . . She had many talents; throughout her life she played the flute and drew, and her interest in literature started at least as early as the age of eleven, when she first started to write."
Fitzhugh's first popular work, Harriet the Spy, is widely regarded as a milestone in children's literature. It concerns a pre-teen living in New York City who considers herself a professional sleuth. Every day after school, Harriet follows a spy route with her trusty black notebook, in which she records her comments on the people she observes. Aspiring to be a famous writer, Harriet has been keeping a notebook since she was eight, and now that she is eleven, she spies for practice. Though the book is written in the third person, the notebook entries, written in the first person, record Harriet's actual language and reveal the content and thought process of her mind. In the course of her spying, Harriet not only learns about some of the duller and sadder aspects of adult life, but also gets into trouble with classmates, teachers, and parents when her notebook is stolen and read. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books reviewer Zena Sutherland found Fitzhugh's characterizations "marvelously shrewd." A Junior Bookshelf contributor had a similar reaction: "It is extraordinary how deeply involved one becomes, almost against one's will, with these characters." And Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Perry Nodelman commented that "Fitzhugh's wonderfully wicked illustrations cleverly support this comic vision of rigidity. In most of them, one of the characters stands alone, pinned in naked isolation against an uncompromisingly blank background and caught in an intense moment of being uncompromisingly him or her self."
Sheila Egoff in Only Connect: Readings on Children's Literature, discussed how Fitzhugh "brings a child to terms with adult life and in the process reveals its unpleasantness and dishonesty." But some critics and educators opposed the idea of a children's book featuring a heroine with such "antisocial" habits: Book Week contributor Houston L. Maples thought Harriet "one of the most fatiguingly ill-mannered children imaginable." Ruth Hill Viguers of Horn Book objected strongly to the book's "disagreeable people and situations" and questioned its realism and suitability for children. She wrote, "The arrival of Harriet the Spy with fanfare and announcements of approval for its realism' makes me wonder again why that word is invariably applied to stories about disagreeable people and situations. Are there really no amiable children? No loyal friends? No parents who are fundamentally loving and understanding? I challenge the implication that New York City harbors only people who are abnormal, ill-adjusted, and egocentric . . . the objects of Harriet's spying are merely depressing types. Her schoolmates . . . represent not reality but the distortion of caricature . . . the heroine's . . . stoical containment of her personal tragedy arouses strong but reluctant sympathy. . . . Many adult readers appreciating the sophistication of the book will find it funny and penetrating. Children, however, do not enjoy cynicism. I doubt its appeal to many of them."
Upon discovering that Horn Book had reviewed the book so harshly, critic Maggie Stern found occasion to write a rebuttal in the same publication. She wrote, "None of the reviewers . . . truly looked at what Louise Fitzhugh had so brilliantly done. Louise Fitzhugh was talking about the balance of life. And this balance, and the loss of balance, is all seen through Harriet. In a sense Harriet is within us all: that feistiness, fire, honesty, quickness to be hurt, softness, loudness, and loneliness. Ruth Hill Viguers missed the essence of the book. She missed its humor, richness, and texture. Time has shown that Harriet the Spy is still read, still loved by children. It appears that children have not found Harriet disagreeable, abnormal, ill-adjusted, or egocentric as Mrs. Viguers suggested. Harriet is a real child, living in a real world. And that is not easy. . . . Through Harriet one sees the process of life, the human struggle. From unawareness to awareness--from order to chaos to new order. Louise Fitzhugh wrote a remarkable book."
Nodelman explained opposition to the seemingly innocuous story: "When Harper and Row published Harriet the Spy in 1964, it excited a great deal of controversy. While the book is anything but realistic in style, it does discuss perfectly ordinary things that were not ordinarily discussed in children's books in the early 1960s." Despite such reactions, however, the book was generally popular with children, and led to a sequel that also featured Harriet, The Long Secret.
Harriet is not the only important character in The Long Secret. The story primarily focuses on a very shy girl, Beth Ellen, who first appeared in Harriet the Spy, and on her attempts to communicate with the world through anonymous notes. Like Harriet, The Long Secret attracted critical attention: Carolyn Heilbrun claimed in the New York Times Book Review that The Long Secret was "capable of surprising even an adult reader." Nodelman pointed out that "Fitzhugh gets away with something tricky [in The Long Secret]; the person from whose point of view much of the story is told turns out to be the perpetrator of the mystery of the notes at the heart of the plot."
The posthumously published Nobody's Family Is Going to Change "is Fitzhugh's most earnest and most paradoxical novel--a savage attack on the rigidity of conventional values that expresses no faith that change is possible," writes Nodelman. "But it does want to change readers' attitudes; it has a point to make, and it makes it energetically and systematically." Like Fitzhugh's other novels, Nobody's Family Is Going to Change points to the evils of all kinds of discrimination, and calls for a respect of individuality. The main character is Emma Sheridan, a young black girl growing up in a middle-class family headed by a tyrannical, chauvinistic father who works as a lawyer. Emma's father wants his son to follow his career path, but Willie wants to become a dancer. Emma, however, sees herself as a future lawyer. Mr. Sheridan's position as the obstruction to his children's dreams keep them from knowing him as a person. Emma, in fact, thinks of him "rather like one thinks of Boulder Dam. He was something to scale or go over in a barrel." At the book's conclusion, Emma has learned that while her parents may not change, she can change her own attitude: "she can accept and live with the fact that nobody will ever be anything but what they already are," states Nodelman.
"Despite the fading contemporaneity of Fitzhugh's writing, her novels still cleverly express the differences between individuality and eccentricity, and between what one owes others and what one deserves oneself," Nodelman resolves. "As her treatment of once-controversial issues becomes less shocking, Fitzhugh's merit as a tough-minded satirist becomes more apparent."
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
