Virginia Hamilton: Award-Winning Author of of Children's Books
Posted on 22. Oct, 2009 by Leshell Hatley in Scholarly Celebrations
Virginia Hamilton (March 12, 1936 – February 19, 2002) was an award-winning author of children’s books. She wrote over 35 books, including M. C. Higgins, The Great, for which she was the first African-American to win the National Book Award in 1974 and the 1975 Newbery Medal. She remains the only African American who has written science fiction/fantasy featuring African American children, in the Justice trilogy.
Named for her grandfather’s home state, Virginia Hamilton grew up in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Coming from a family of storytellers, Virginia knew she wanted to be a writer. At age nine she wrote her first novel, entitled The Novel, which was her juvenile collection of gossip. She later lost it and once commented that psychologically her writing may be an attempt to gain back her “lost novel.”
As a child she freely explored the surrounding rural area of Glen Helen, which served as a model for the setting of several of her books. She remembers as a child a strange big house that served as a model for the abolitionist house in The House of Dies Drear. Although she did not encounter overt racism as a child, she was aware that after her father earned a degree in business, he dressed impeccably in a suit and tie, went to the bank to apply for a job as a teller, and was instead handed a mop and bucket.
Education
She enrolled in Antioch College with a five-year scholarship. There Hamilton wrote short stories that she remembers being asked to revise for their unusual plots and characterizations. She later attended Ohio State University (1957–1958) and the New School for Social Research. At the latter she took a writing course taught by Hiriam Hayden, founder of Atheneum Publishers, who unsuccessfully encouraged publishers to print her first adult novel, Mayo.
Her Writing…
Hamilton’s first book, Zeely, was published in 1967 (a book she began writing at Antioch), and she continued to write for the rest of her life. Her protagonists are generally African-American. She is known as a leader in the field of African-American children’s literature. Since the 1970s, the number of children’s books featuring African American characters has declined (with a small increase in the early 1990s); however, the continuous publication of Virginia Esther Perry Hamilton’s provocative works reminds the public that artistic integrity in African American-authored children’s and young adult literature has not been relinquished.
She worked in New York for fifteen years at various jobs including bookkeeping and singing, and married Arnold Adoff, a poet and anthologist, on 19 March 1960. The Planet of Junior Brown and the Jahdu books, whose settings are Harlem, reflect her New York experiences.
Her book 1983 Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush was awarded a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. It is about a teenage girl, Tree, who has difficulty getting over the death of her brother Dab. Hamilton said that she was hesitant at first about including a ghost in some scenes in the novel, but that she later decided that it felt right.
The Integrity of Her Writing
Hamilton maintained her integrity for writing by uniting politics and art and by continuing to capture the universal in the particulars and complexities of the African American experience. Hamilton, generally satisfied her goal “to find a certain form and content to express black literature as American literature and perpetuate a pedigree of American black literature for the young,” as stated by Violet Harris (Black Women in America).
Within this pedigree, Hamilton has published African American children’s fiction in more genres than any other writer. This pedigree also includes contemporary realistic fiction such as Plain City (1993), historical fiction such as Cousins (1989), folk tales, fantasy, slave narratives like Many Thousands Gone (1993), mysteries such as House of Dies Drear (1973), and biographies that include Hugo Black, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Anthony Burns.
A String of Firsts
Hamilton’s work captures unconventional themes and multitextured characterizations in African American children’s literature, addressing such issues as the environment in M. C. Higgins, the Great(1974) and Drylongso (1992). Her use of unconventional stream of consciousness and language in Arilla Sun Down (1976) is also noteworthy. Perhaps most important, though, is Hamilton’s string of “firsts”: the first young adult novel to feature a black-Native American family; the first modern urban African American trickster, in the Jahdu books (1969, 1973, 1980); the first modern African American myth of ancestral origins for African American children as seen in The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl (1984), as well as superbly revisioning African American folk heroes such as John Henry and High John the Conqueror; the first to create a young adult novel featuring the ties between African Americans and Caribbeans, in Junius Over Far (1985); the first African American children’s novel based on slave history, The House of Dies Drear (1970); the first to capture the theme of homelessness in African American children’s novels, in The Planet of Junior (1974); and the first author to examine the theme of interracial (black/white) dating among teenagers, in A White Romance (1987).
Hamilton considered The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl her magnum opus. It connects well with African American literary tradition in its superb development of African American folklore. With Pretty Pearl, Hamilton pioneered the demonstration of African mythological influences on African American mythology to young readers. Like Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Toni Morrison, Hamilton too has planted her folk roots, soared her mythic wings, and elevated rituals of storytelling in a way to provoke a child’s or young adult’s imagination.
Critics have criticized yet applauded Hamilton for her divergence from the conventional, her complexities in language, characters, and narrative style.
Awards and Honors
For all of this, Hamilton has received an unprecedented number of awards: the Newbery Medal, several Newberry Honor awards, three Globe-Horn Book Awards, the Regina Medal, the Edgar Allen Poe Award, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and the Hans Christian Andersen Award and honorary doctorates. She was also the first children’s author to receive the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. The Virginia Hamilton Conference on Multicultural Literature for Youth has been held at Kent State University each year since 1984.
Hamilton loved old movies, trees, and Ohio sunsets. Hamilton lived on land her family purchased in the 1850s after her great-great-grandmother escaped with her son from slavery in Virginia. She was later to say home was freedom and internment—dominant binary oppositions in her fiction that was early influenced by Edgar Allen Poe, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Carson McCullers.
She died of breast cancer in 2002. Manuscripts of her work can be found at Kent State and the Kerlan collection of the University of Minnesota. Her official website can be found at http://www.virginiahamilton.com.
-Obtained from answers.com and wikipedia
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