Rachel Field

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Rachel Field bigraphy, stories - Novelist, poet, children's author

Rachel Field : biography

September 19, 1894 – March 15, 1942

Rachel Lyman Field (1894-1942) was an American novelist, poet, and children’s fiction writer. She is best known for the Newbery Award-winning Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. Field also won a National Book Award, Newbery Honor award and two of her books are on the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list.

Life

Field was a descendant of David Dudley Field, the early New England clergyman and writer. She grew up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. As a child, she contributed to the St. Nicholas Magazine. She was educated at Radcliffe College.

According to Ruth Hill Viguers, Field was "fifteen when she first visited Maine and fell under the spell of its ‘island-scattered coast’. Calico Bush [1931] still stands out as a near-perfect re-creation of people and place in a story of courage, understated and beautiful."Ruth Hill Viguers, "Introduction" (date?) to Calico Bush by Rachel Field (1931).

Field married Arthur S. Pederson in 1935, with whom she collaborated in 1937 on To See Ourselves. In 1938 one of her plays was adapted for the British film The Londonderry Air. at Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2012-03-15. She was also successful as an author of adult fiction, writing the bestsellers Time Out of Mind (1935), All This and Heaven Too (1938), and And Now Tomorrow (1942). They were adapted as films produced under their own titles in 1947, 1940, and 1944 respectively. Field also wrote the English lyrics for that version of Franz Schubert’s "Ave Maria" used in the Disney film Fantasia.Fantasia, end screen credits, last segment "Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria".

Field is famous, too, for her poem-turned-song "Something Told the Wild Geese". She also wrote a story about the nativity of Jesus, "All Through the Night".

She moved to Hollywood, where she lived with her husband and two children.Newbery Medal Books: 1922–1955, eds. Bertha Mahony Miller and Elinor Whitney Field, The Horn Book, Inc., 1955, LOC 55-13968, pp. 77–85.

Rachel Field died at the Good Samaritan Hospital on March 15, 1942, of pneumonia following an operation.

Awards

Hitty, Her First Hundred Years received the Newbery Award in 1930, for the year’s "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children."

The 1944 (posthumous) Prayer for a Child, with a story by Field and illustrations by Elizabeth Orton Jones, won the Caldecott Medal recognizing the year’s "most distinguished picture book for children" published in the U.S. . Association for Library Service to Children. ALA. Retrieved 2012-03-15.

Hitty and Prayer for a Child were both named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list of books deemed to belong "on the same bookshelf" with Carroll’s Alice. Prayer for a Child was one of the seventeen inaugural selections in 1958, which were originally published 1893 to 1957. Hitty was added in 1961.

Time Out of Mind won one of the inaugural National Book Awards as the Most Distinguished Novel of 1935, voted by the American Booksellers Association. "Books and Authors", The New York Times, April 12, 1936, page BR12. "Lewis is Scornful of Radio Culture: Nothing Ever Will Replace the Old-Fashioned Book, He Tells Booksellers", The New York Times, May 12, 1936, page 25.