About the Author:
Marjorie Hill Allee was born on June 2, 1890. She grew up on the Indiana farm that had been in the family since the early migration of Quakers from the Carolinas a resettlement of which she writes in a number of her books. After two years of college, and a year of teaching all eight grades in the schoolhouse she herself attended, she continued her own education at the nascent University of Chicago. It was here that she met her husband, Warder Clyde Allee. His profession as a zoologist led the family to live and work in interesting locations, giving Mrs. Allee a wide range of backgrounds and cultures to draw upon for her books. One example is Jane s Island a Newbery Honor Book that uses for its setting the well-known Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She wrote 13 fiction books for young people, as well as a non-fiction one called Jungle Island. This latter title (with her husband as co-author) was actually her first published book and grew out of a year s sojourn in Panama which the Allees had made following the tragic death of their ten-year-old son, Warder.
Mrs. Allee s writing agreeably co-existed with a domestic life as wife to a busy scientist/teacher and as mother of her two daughters, Barbara and Mary. An article by her life-long friend Amy Winslow in Horn Book (May, 1946) notes that upon hitting a block in her writing, Mrs. Allee learned to lapse into passivity, to hunt for some different occupation, preferably monotonous and undemanding on the mind, and let the conflict settle itself . . . . In this same article, she is further quoted as saying, In the case of a person like myself, whose real occupation is housekeeping, this can be arranged one way or another. . . . Susanna on her old white horse first came riding toward me beyond an ironing board. (See: Susanna and Tristram and its sequel The Road to Carolina.)
Marjorie Hill Allee died in April, 1945.
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