Virginia Hamilton 1936—

Children’s and young adult author

At a Glance…

Zeely Attracted Attention

Published Animal Fable

A “Good Story” Is the Point

Selected writings

Sources

Growing up on a small farm near Yellow Springs, Ohio, Virginia Hamilton was lovingly embraced by the sights, sounds, and smells of rural America and by a big extended family of cousins, uncles, and aunts. All of these things would come into play in the children’s stories Hamilton would spin as an adult. But probably the biggest influence on Virginia Hamilton—whom Entertainment Weekly has called “a majestic presence in children’s literature”—was the fact that her own parents were storytellers.

As a child, Hamilton’s maternal grandfather, Levi Perry, escaped slavery in Virginia by crossing the Ohio River. More than 50,000 slaves passed through the Ohio or settled there during antebellum times, aided along the Underground Railroad by Shawnee Indians and white abolitionists. The homes in which the escapees hid became catacombed with secret passages and hiding spaces. Years later, descriptions of what happened in those hiding places and “stations” on the Underground Railroad made captured young Virginia’s attention as she—named for her grandfather’s home state—listened to the tales while seated at her mother’s and father’s knee.

“My mother said that her father sat his ten children down every year and said, ‘I’m going to tell you how I escaped from slavery, so slavery will never happen to you,” ‘ Hamilton related in a telephone interview with CBB. She added that she traces her own interest in literature to the fact that her parents were “unusually fine story tellers, and realized, although, I don’t know how consciously, that they were passing along heritage and culture and a pride in their history.”

Hamilton has picked up on those strains, writing and editing stories for more than 30 children’s books, including contemporary novels about teenagers, biographies of the historical figures Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois, and collections of African American folklore and slavery-era “liberation” stories. For her work she has been repeatedly honored, including the Hans Christian Andersen Medal. Still, her most satisfying reward has been alerting children of their rich ethnic culture.

“Up until this year [1995], I think,” Hamilton commented in her CBB interview, “5,000 new children’s title were published every year. And out of that, maybe 40 of them were African American books.” Thanks to

At a Glance…

Born Virginia Hamilton on March 12, 1936, in Yellow Springs, Ohio; daughter of Kenneth James (a musician) and Etta Belle (Perry) Hamilton; married Arnold Adolff (an anthologist and author), March 19, 1960; children: Leigh (daughter) and Jaime Levi (son). Education: Attended Antioch College, 1952–55; Ohio State University, B.A., 1958; attended New School for Social Research, 1959.

Children’s and young adult’s author. Held various jobs in New York City as receptionist, nightclub singer, cost accountant. Whittall Lecturer, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 1975; visiting professor, Queens College, 1986–87.

Selected awards: Edgar Allen Poe Award, Mystery Writers of America, 1969, for The House of Dies Drear; Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, University of Wisconsin, 1972, Newberry Honor Book Award, American Library Association, 1972, both for The Planet of Junior Brown; Children’s Spring Book Festival Honor Book, Book World, 1973, for Time-Ago Lost; John Newberry Medal, 1975, National Book Award, 1975, both for M. C. Higgins, the Great; Ohioana Literary Book Award, 1981, Coretta Scott King Award, American Library Association, 1983, Regina Medal, 1989, and Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, 1995, all for body of work; Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for nonfiction, 1983; Parents’ Choice Award for Literature, Parents’ Choice Foundation, 1983, for The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl; Hans Christian Andersen Medal, 1992; MacArthur Foundation prize, 1995. Honorary doctorate, Ohio State University, 1994.

Addresses: Office— Box 293, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387.

Hamilton—who for the past decade has lent her name to an annual conference on multicultural children’s literature—and thanks to writers who have followed her lead, the dearth of literature about the ethnic experience is beginning to change.

Hamilton was born to Kenneth James and Etta Belle (Perry) Hamilton on March 12, 1936. For company, Virginia had two older brothers and two older sisters; hogs and chickens and other farm animals; and endless numbers of relatives who lived on surrounding farms outside the college town of Yellow Springs, Ohio. “It was conceivable you could range a whole day and never leave family land,” Hamilton informed CBB. She described her family as “rural people with not a lot of money”—her father was both a farmer and a dining hall service manger at nearby Antioch College—but, she says, her childhood was a tremendously happy one.

Attending Antioch from 1952 to 1955, Hamilton transferred to and eventually graduated from Ohio State University. Unlike others of her age who were confused about career goals, Hamilton was set on being a writer. “I started writing as a kid; it was always something I was going to do.” Taking off to see the world, she settled in New York City, where she studied writing at the New School for Social Research and fell in love with a young poet, Arnold Adolff, whom she married in March of 1960.

The couple began a life together in the big city, writing as much as they could and making a living at whatever they could. Hamilton related that during those early years, she worked at such varied jobs as cost accountant for an engineering firm, nightclub singer, and museum receptionist. In 1963, her daughter Leigh was born; her son, Jaime Levi, followed in 1967. That same year, she published her first book, Zeely. She and her family moved back to Yellow Springs shortly afterwards.

Zeely Attracted Attention

Zeely is the story of the young girl in rural America who fantasizes that a tall majestic young woman in her town is an African queen, only find out that she actually is. “It was one of the very first books where black characters are simply being people and living; it’s not a ‘problem’ book about integration,” Hamilton said. As a result, Zeely attracted considerable attention. This was, after all, the era of racial strife across the country, mixed with a rising credo of “black is beautiful.” The time was right, and besides, editors at the MacMillan publishing house were suitably impressed by the short story from which the book evolved; Hamilton had been lucky enough to have a friend working at MacMillan who pushed for the editors to pay Hamilton attention.

Not satisfied to rest on her laurels, Hamilton quickly turned out her next book, The House of Dies Drear, in 1968. Dies Drear received the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best juvenile mystery of the year. It was rich with the historical research that would underlie many of her subsequent works, and it harked back to the stories of liberation Hamilton grew up with in Yellow Springs, located just 60 miles north of the Ohio River, the legendary boundary between “slave” states and free ones.

Hamilton’s book told of a modern family that buys an old house that had been a “station” on the Underground Railroad. In addition to being the scene of deaths of its owner, Dies Drear, and two slaves, the house holds an incredible secret. Published just a little more than a century after abolition, the book delighted young readers, much as those old stories and secret passages had delighted the young author.

“Basically,” Louann Toth, book review editor for School Library Journal, affirmed in an interview with CBB, “Hamilton is a marvelous storyteller; and so she brings that sense of narrative and just a wonderful sense of language to everything she does. Many of her novels have many levels, but first and foremost they are good stories,” Toth continued. “Several of her books have boys as main characters, and she seems to be able to get into a boy’s head as easily as a young girl’s. And I think that’s really a special talent.”

Hamilton followed her first two big successes with a long line of books covering different genres: The Planet of Junior Brown was a story of urban life in New York City while Justice and Her Brothers together with Dustland and The Gathering comprised Hamilton’s “Justice Cycle” and were her tribute to the genre of science fiction. The Gathering, for example, was set on earth a million years in the future. Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush delved into the supernatural, introducing a ghost to usher the book’s characters into the past. “If you write well enough, you can get people to believe whatever you’re thinking,” Hamilton quipped in her CBB interview, adding that she wrote the book to “put to rest” a childhood vision in which she believed she saw a ghost.

In 1985, Hamilton published an entirely different kind of book, The People Could Fly, a beautifully illustrated collection of true narrative and fantasy dating from slave times and encompassing tales ranging from “Bruh Rabbit” to a fantastical story of a slave who helps others escape by teaching them to rise into the air and fly away from their hot drudgery in the cotton fields. “None of these stories was ever written for children,” Hamilton explained to CBB. “They were just told; so I redid them, brought them out of the musty old manuscripts where nobody ever saw them. And people went for it strongly.” En route, Hamilton began to include with these collections commentary on the tales—who the collector was, who the teller was, whether the story was unique to African American literature or was an alternate version of a European story. “I go for the old manuscripts of out-of-print materials that are languishing in libraries,” Hamilton added, noting that Central State University in Ohio near her home is one such resource, along with state folklore societies and old 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA) collections.

Hamilton subsequently published two more books in the same genre: In the Beginning: Creation Stories From Around the World and Many Thousand Gone: African Americans From Slavery to Freedom. The latter retold the stories of such historical figures as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglas, as well as their lesser known contemporaries, like Henry Box Brown, a slave who enclosed himself in a crate and mailed himself to freedom; and “Jackson,” a slave who escaped north dressed as a maid.

Hamilton also writes about contemporary social problems. Young teenagers are particularly apt to enjoy Plain City, Hamilton’s 1993 book dealing with the issues of homelessness and racial prejudice. 12-year-old protagonist Buhlaire Sims is growing up in a small Midwest city and feeling like an outsider because of her rasta hair twists and honey-colored hair, which itself reflects an element of “vanilla” in her lineage. Buhlaire, who want more than anything to know who she is, has always believed her father died in the Vietnam war. But one day, an adult points out that the timing of her birth makes this impossible; her father may still be alive.

Published Animal Fable

This revelation sends Buhlaire on a journey of discovery—a journey that only begins when she sadly finds her father living sordidly beneath a highway bridge, a homeless, mentally ill vagrant. As the novel progresses, Buhlaire makes peace with her mother, a nightclub singer who is never home; her aunts and uncles who hover but rarely connect; and a strange boy in school who shadows her every move. “I was really interested in this winter tale,” Hamilton admitted to CBB, “in having the reader feel the cold and know what it was like and what this kid who was always moving was like, and what that meant. She was restless, she was hunting something, she was always out on the landscape, and I wanted to put her in nature.”

If Buhlaire is on a journey, so is her creator. “I make choices about whom to portray, in writing books of history and liberation,” Hamilton remarked in her acceptance speech for the 1988 Boston Globe/Horn Book award. “Liberation literature not only frees the subject of record and evidence but the witness as well, who is also the reader, who then becomes part of the struggle. We take our position then, rightly, as participants alongside the victim. We become emotionally involved in his problem; we suffer; and we triumph, as the victim triumphs, in the solution of liberation.”

A “Good Story” Is the Point

In 1995, Hamilton published Jagarundi, a picture book for young children that offered a new slant on her liberation theme: an animal fable. Jagarundi is the tale of several little-known animals, among them a jagarundi, or wild cat; a coati, or type of raccoon; a kit fox; a brush dog; and a capuchin monkey. The animals all “discuss” among themselves the pros and cons of emigrating north from their home in the Central American rain forest, where their habitat is threatened by man, to an uncertain future in the southwestern United States. Hamilton call her concern with the rain forest and other environmental troubles her “green theme”: “I have a lot of books having to do with ecology,” she told CBB. “Drylongso is about a drought; M. C. Higgins the Great is about strip-mining. I grew up in this area where land and the importance of saving it is so very great.”

When she went to work on Jagarundi, influenced by having seen a jagarundi in captivity in Arizona, Hamilton said, she never dreamed she’d discover another connection to matters close to her heart. “The story parallels humans who escaped their homelands in search of better, safer lands,” the author proclaimed at the Tenth Annual Virginia Hamilton Conference in 1994. “I was astounded to discover the added bonus, with the animals, of a classic symbolism of fleeing North—crossing the Great River [the Rio Grande] into a Promised Land.” Numerous of Hamilton’s works have been designated as American Library Association (ALA) Notable Books; in addition, her writings have repeatedly been chosen for annual “best books” lists by other esteemed organizations such as the Horn Book honor list, School Library Journal’s Best Children’s Books list, New York Times Outstanding Books of the Year, and the New York Public Library’s Children’s Books lists. Furthermore, several of Hamilton’s creations have been adapted into other media formats (Braille, talking books, filmstrips), most notably the late-1980s film version of The House of Dies Drear. Starring Howard Rollins, the movie was produced as part of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) “Wonderworks” family series.

Asked by CBB what she is trying to accomplish with each book, Hamilton—who published a new book late in 1995 and was due to release another in spring of 1996—flatly rejected the notion. “That’s not how you write a book,” she said. “You’re not trying to ‘accomplish’ anything, but tell a good story, and my books are full of good stories.” These are stories with which her readers, aged “8 to 80,” can identify. Hamilton added: “What happens when you tell a story, and you’ re African American is everything you say or do somehow becomes symbolic as something else—you don’t have to try to say something because it’s there, it’s your life, it’s in your history. I’m strongly plot-oriented; I try to represent original ideas—and good stories.” For so doing, Hamilton was awarded the MacArthur Foundation’s 1995 prize of $350,000.

Selected writings

Juvenile novels

Zeely, Macmillan, 1967.

The House of Dies Drear, Macmillan, 1968.

The Time Ago Tales of Jadhu, Macmillan, 1969.

The Planet of Junior Brown, Macmillan, 1971.

Time-Ago Lost: More Tales of Jadhu, Macmillan, 1971.

M. C. Higgins, the Great, Macmillan, 1974, large print edition, G. K. Hall, 1976.

Arilla Sun Down, Greenwillow, 1976.

Jahdu, Greenwillow, 1980, large print edition, 1980.

Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, Philomel, 1982.

The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl, Harper, 1983.

Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed, Greenwillow, 1983.

A Little Love, Philomel, 1984.

Junius Over Far, Harper, 1985.

The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales, Knopf, 1985.

The Mystery of Drear House, Greenwillow, 1987.

A White Romance, Philomel, 1987.

Bells of Christmas, Harcourt Brace, 1989.

Cousins, Philomel Books, 1990.

The Dark Way: Stories From the Spirit World, Harcourt Brace, 1990.

All Jadhu Storybook, Harcourt Brace, 1991.

Drylongso, 1992.

Plain City, Scholastic, 1993.

Jagarundi, Scholastic, 1994.

Justice trilogy

Justice and Her Brothers, Greenwillow, 1978.

Dustland, Greenwillow, 1980.

The Gathering, Greenwillow, 1981.

Other

W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography, Crowell, 1972.

Paul Robeson: The Life and Times of a Free Black Man, Harper, 1975.

(Editor) The Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Crowell, 1976.

(Contributor) Once Upon a Time … Celebrating the Magic of Children’s Books in Honor of the Twentieth Anniversary of Reading Is Fundamental, Putnam, 1986.

In the Beginning: Creation Stories From Around the World, Harcourt, 1988.

Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave, Knopf, 1988.

Many Thousand Gone: African-Americans From Slavery to Freedom, PLB, 1992.

Sources

Entertainment Weekly, February 5, 1993.

The Hornbook Magazine, March/April 1989, p. 183.

Instructor, February 1994, p. 64.

Additional information for this profile was obtained through a telephone interview with Virginia Hamilton on April 24, 1995; a telephone interview with Louann Toth, book review editor for School Library Journal, April 23, 1995; and 1995 publicity materials supplied by Virginia Hamilton’s publisher, The Blue Sky Press, an imprint of Scholastic, Inc.

—Joan Oleck