This original version of The Box-Car Children is published in Noah Text(R), a proprietary evidenced-based method of presenting text. Noah Text(R) highlights critical word patterns to help struggling readers, striving readers, those with dyslexia, and English language-learners read with increased fluency, accuracy, and stamina.
The original 1924 edition of The Box-Car Children, with its colorful illustrations, was the beginning of a legacy of books created by American author Gertrude Chandler Warner. The wildly popular series has continued to thrive through more 150 different books and a Hollywood animated film adaptation. Follow four children -- Henry, Jess, Violet, and Benny -- as they live in an old abandoned boxcar in the middle of the woods. Concerned that they will be forced to live with their "mean" grandfather, they use their wits to hide from the authorities, create a warm loving home, and have an adventure of a lifetime! Enjoyed by millions of children and adults over the years, this book is a classic to revisit again and again. (Note to educators: Whether your students read independently or they follow along as you read to them aloud, this special edition will enable them to enjoy the story while observing critical word and sound patterns that facilitate improvements in their reading skills.)
Gertrude Chandler Warner (1890-1979) was born in Putnam, CT. Best known as the author of The Boxcar Children and 18 more books in the same series, she dreamed of being an author from the age of five. Her first effort was an imitation of Florence Kate Upton's Golliwog stories, which she called Golliwog at the Zoo. Warner loved to read while she was growing up; her favorite book was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Because she was sickly, Warner never finished high school; she received tutoring to finish her secondary education. During World War I, while she was teaching Sunday School and there was a shortage of teachers because so many men had gone to war, Warner was asked to teach first grade. She continued as a teacher in her home town of Putnam from 1918 to 1950. Warner loved nature and made use of her interest in flora and fauna in the classroom. Similarly, she infused her books with nature themes. For example, in Surprise Island, the second book of The Boxcar Children series, the Alden children make a nature museum from the objects they have collected and the bird shapes they have seen. Warner wrote other children's books in addition to the Boxcar Children series, including The World in a Barn (1927), Windows into Alaska (1928), The World on a Farm (1931), and Peter Piper, Missionary Parakeet (1967). Warner never married and lived in her parents' house for almost forty years. She later moved to her grandmother's house and in 1962, she started living in a different house with a companion, a retired nurse. Before she died at the age of 89, she did volunteer work for the American Red Cross, the Connecticut Cancer Society, and other charitable organizations. She is buried in Grove Street Cemetery in Putnam.
Dorothy Lake Gregory was a printmaker and illustrator of children's magazines and books, notably The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. While studying in Provincetown, MA, under Charles Hawthorne, Gregory met Ross Moffett, an American artist who became a significant figure in the development of American Modernism after World War I and specialized in landscape painting, social realism-themed murals, and etchings. Moffett and Gregory were married in 1920 in Brooklyn, NY.
