Children's book author Jean Van Leeuwen has died. The award-winning writer was best known for her sprightly tales starring such anthropomorphic characters as sibling pigs and a gang of mice. She died on Mar. 3 at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. at the age of 87.
Van Leeuwen's daughter, Elizabeth Gavril, told NPR the cause was cancer and said the family had taken its time to share the news about the author's death.
Published by , Van Leeuwen's 20-book series featured pig siblings Oliver and Amanda. Amanda Pig and the Really Hot Day, illustrated by Anne Schweninger, won the 2006 American Library Association's for the most distinguished book for beginning readers. The book describes how Amanda gets through a tough day of soaring temperatures with the help of hose sprinkling and lemonade drinking. In Tales of Oliver Pig, illustrated by Arnold Lobel, Oliver and Amanda bake oatmeal cookies with their mom on a cold, wet day, among other activities.
"When we were young, we gave her many story ideas apparently," said Gavril of her mom in an interview with NPR on Saturday. "A lot of the Oliver and Amanda Pig books are based on experiences that my brother David and I went through as children."
Galvin points to a Tales of Amanda Pig story titled "Amanda's egg." "Amanda doesn't like eggs and she just sits at the table and she stares at her egg and she won't eat it," said Gavril of what happens in the story. "And her father pig goes out into the yard and does his work, and Oliver Pig goes out to play and mother Pig goes off and whatever, and Amanda Pig just sits there and stares at her egg. And that's certainly a true story."
Van Leeuwen wrote nearly 60 books. They were translated into multiple languages and some titles sold millions of copies, according to . One of them, The Great Cheese Conspiracy, which introduced young readers to a renegade mouse named Marvin the Magnificent and his pals, was adapted in 1986 into a Czech .
"She was a wise, humorous, and wonderful writer," wrote children's book author Roni Schotter in an email of remembrances forwarded to NPR.
Van Leeuwen was born in Glenridge, N.J., and grew up in nearby Rutherford, the daughter of a minister father and school teacher mother. At Syracuse University, she majored in magazine journalism and took a job at T.V. Guide in New York City after graduating in 1959. She worked as a children's book editor for about a decade for Random House, Viking Press and Dial Books. Gavril said her mother started writing books on the side, and continued to do so after she left her publishing career to raise her two children.
" We were in this little apartment in New York City and she used to write during our nap times," Gavril said. "She would just run the dishwasher over and over to drown out my brother's talking or whatever."
After the family moved to New York's suburban Westchester County in 1977, Gavril said her mom had more time to herself and would write consistently in the mornings, and sometimes also in the afternoons. She didn't only write picture books for very young children. Her output included fiction for middle graders and young adults. One popular title for older children is Bound for Oregon, a fictionalized version of the journey made by 9-year-old Mary Ellen Todd and her family over the Oregon Trail in 1852, with illustrations by James Watling.
As a former children's book editor, the author was acutely aware of her craft.
"The challenge of writing an easy-to-read book, with its strict limits of length and vocabulary, is to tell a story that is simple but not ordinary," Van Leeuwen wrote in .
Van Leeuwen didn't give many interviews and preferred not to draw too much attention to herself. "Jean was so modest about her writing," children's author and illustrator Marisabina Russo, who was in an authors' group with Van Leeuwen, wrote in an email. "She never volunteered to be the first in our group to share her latest draft."
Yet she was community-minded. In her older years, Van Leeuwen spent more than two decades volunteering at Douglas Grafflin Elementary School in Chappaqua, according to her daughter.
According to a 2015 in local publication The Inside Press, the students got to know the author each year as "community volunteer Mrs. Gavril," only to later learn they had been working with the author of their beloved Oliver and Amanda Pig books the whole time.
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