Lois Lowry Biography

Lois Lowry – American author, b. 1937

Lois Lowry is well known as the author of the books about Anastasia Krupnik and her precocious younger brother, Sam. Always getting herself in trouble, Lois Lowry’s irrepressible heroine has a good-na­tured sense of humor that has made popular titles such as Anastasia at Your Service (1984), de­tailing her first job, and Anastasia’s Chosen Ca­reer (1987), tracing her search for a profession.

The first book about Anastasia’s brother, AU About Sam (1988), tells his life story from Sam’s own comical point of view, beginning with his first impressions of the world as a newborn. Other popular titles of middle-grade fiction are the amusing books about siblings Caroline and J. P. Tate. In Switcharound (1985), Caroline and J. P. make separate plans to get back at their father and his wife, who invited them for the summer only to stick them with some heavy responsibilities. The normally feuding siblings join forces when they realize at the last minute that they must help each other undo their awful plans.

Lois Lowry is equally adroit at telling stories in a more serious vein, as evidenced by A Summer to Die which marked her debut as a children’s book writer. In this novel, winner of the International Reading Association’s Children’s Book Award, thirteen-year-old Megs friendship with an elderly but lively and active neighbor gives her strength through the summer during which her older sister suffers a serious illness and eventually dies. The sensitive and moving account also portrays the hope and joy of a new life when Meg witnesses the birth of a neighbor’s baby.

In Autumn Street (1980), Lowry’s finest piece of writing, the narrator looks back on the year she was six, when her father left to fight in World War II. The story begins with the care-free in­nocence of Elizabeths close friendship with Charles, an African American boy, and ends with the violence and shock of his murder. When Elizabeth’s father is injured and subse­quently returns home, he and his young daugh­ter make an “impossible promise” to each other that their separate fears and hurts will go away, knowing that sometimes hope is more impor­tant than truth. The flawlessly crafted prose is only one of the reasons the story lingers; in the readers mind long after the book has been closed.

In Rabble Starkey (1987), twelve-year-old Rabble Starkey’s mother serves as housekeeper and baby sitter for the family of a woman even­tually hospitalized for mental illness. When Mrs. Bigelow recovers and returns home, Rabble and her mother move on, saying goodbye to people who have become their friends and family. The first-person narrative is written in an authentic- sounding down-home voice, and the characters, learning the joys and sorrows of loving and of leaving, are especially well drawn.

Number the Stars (1989), winner of the 1990 Newbery Medal, tells about ten-year-old Anne-Marie Johansen, who lives in Denmark in 1943. When her family help smuggle their Jewish neighbors, including the young protagonists best friend, into Sweden, something goes wrong and Annemarie must exhibit a kind of bravery she never knew she had. The suspenseful, unfor­gettable novel is geared toward a young audience but does not oversimplify the story of the multi­tude of people forced to flee their homeland.

Lois Lowry won a second Newbery Medal in 1994 for her innovative novel The Giver (1993). Set in a futuristic world that seems to have solved all of humanity’s problems — poverty, unemploy­ment, inequality, the loneliness and insecurity of the aged — the story recounts the coming of age of twelve-year-old Jonas. Jonas’s gifts of clear sight and empathy earn him the apprenticeship to the Giver, the community’s reclusive keeper of all that it has given up — the good and the bad — to achieve its stable placidity. Jonas, in seeing both sides, learns to question the bargain struck, and his responses to his discoveries make The Giver a provocative, moving, haunting work.

In Looking Back (1998), Lowry explored her life, using both prose and photographs, and how it has influenced her writing. Lois Lowry, who as a child moved from Hawaii to Pennsylvania, then to Japan, is an author who writes from experi­ence. The act of leaving is repeated several times in her books as characters pull up roots and move away, end painful relationships, or lose loved ones to death or distance. The author’s ex­perience as a journalist and photographer has provided her with an eye for detail, a skill mani­fested in her clear, vivid descriptions of place and time. Called the new Judy Blume, Lowry has lived up to that description with her tremen­dous popularity among middle-grade readers.

J.M.B.

Source: Children’s Books and their Creators, Anita Silvey.

Lois Lowry Works