An Interview with Milton Meltzer

Milton Meltzer is the author of some 40 books of history and biography, for children and adults. Four of his titles were nominees for the National Book Award and many have earned places on the ALA Notable lists and the New York Times Best Books of the Year. He is completing a four-year adjunct professorship in history at the University of Massachusetts where he has prepared a complete annotated edition of the letters of Lydia Maria Child, the abolitionist and advocate of women's rights, under a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. His most recent children's books are All Times, All Peoples: A World History of Slavery, illustrated by Leonard Everett Fisher (Harper & Row) and The Chinese Americans (Crowell).

GD: We'd like to start by asking how you came to write so many books about oppressed peoples.

MM: That's something I wasn't aware I was doing initially. It wasn't until some ten books had been published that one reviewer observed that I was known for my books dealing with social issues, with the necessity for social change, and that I always took the side of the underdog. That's when it dawned on me it was what I had been doing, without any conscious plan. It obviously came out of some human necessity that I'm sure was shaped by my growing up during the depression of the Thirties. My parents were immigrants, my father a window cleaner, and my mother a factory worker. I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, finished high school in 1932 and got a scholarship to a new experimental college at Columbia (it no longer exists) which was designed to train undergraduates for teaching. It was a wonderful experience, but in my senior year I dropped out because the future seemed so bleak. The Depression had been going on for six or seven years and in spite of the New Deal, hope for work was very small, so I thought, what was the point of finishing? There were no jobs at all for teachers. Schools were contracting; budgets were being cut. I couldn't find a job. I was desperate to do anything. I went on relief—what we call welfare today—and stayed on relief for about six months. Then the W.P.A. Arts Projects began and I got a job on the Federal Theater Project as a staff writer, preparing educational materials, background on the plays, both contemporary and classical, that the project was producing in New York City theaters. They often brought students into the theaters to see W.P.A. plays, and sometimes the plays toured the schools. The job of our small unit was to provide teaching aids. I remember those few years as uproarious and wonderful. We were often on union picket lines, fighting to keep our jobs as Congress cut budgets again and again. I wrote a young adult book on all this—Violins and Shovels—which has some of my personal experiences in it. I guess growing up in hard times made me interested in this kind of material.

GD: When did you start doing research and writing history?

MM: Well, I didn't write books until I was in my late thirties. Until then I wrote for newspapers and magazines, radio, public relations projects. . . . Writing was my way to make a living. But I didn't think of writing a book until I got to that perilous time when I was nearing forty. Nothing is more ephemeral than yesterday's newspaper or last week's magazine and I began to wonder whether anything I did would last, even a little while. I came up the idea for my first book, the Pictorial History of Black Americans, which I did with Langston Hughes. It appeared in 1956, just ahead of the public attention to civil rights issues. It was a great learning experience working with Langston. We became friends and eventually I did another book with him (Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment) published in 1968, soon after he...