Lois Lenski: Storycatcher by Bobbie Malone (review)

Lois Lenski (1893-1974) was a prolific writer/illustrator of children's books for over fifty years (3). Casual readers of children's books may recall her Newbery-winning Strawberry Girl. Librarians and teachers of early childhood still delight in her "Little" books featuring Papa Small, with their small format for children's hands and easily accessible topics and language; The Little Auto (1934), for instance, was innovative not only in format but also in content. Yet even those immersed in the world of children's literature may not be aware that Lenski was the original illustrator of Watty Piper's best-selling The Little Engine That Could (1930) or that she believed that her most important works were what have been referred to as her regional titles, which include Houseboat Girl and Prairie School with their underlying themes of social justice.

Bobbie Malone traces Lenski's maturity as an artist and writer as she explores her work across genre and format. Lenski entered children's books though illustration. The classic Betsy-Tacy series provides a perfect example of her ability to render figures, imprinting images of these characters in the minds of generations of readers. Lenski's writing developed from fiction to historical fiction with her Newbery Honor for Phebe Fairchild: Her Book (1937), and she became a creator whose style was "an interdependent meld of illustration and text that distinguished her from her contemporaries" (4). Throughout this volume, Malone seamlessly weaves the work of Leonard Marcus in Minders of Make-Believe and Gary Schmidt in Making Americans: Children's Literature from 1930 to 1960, exploring not only historical context but also educational theory and the contemporaneous world of American children's book publishing.

Malone captures the times and places of Lenski's life, describing the fashions of the Roaring Twenties, the effects of the Great Depression on her marriage, and how the social movements of the 1950s and 1960s informed her series of regional books. Lenski's story is also one of American feminism, a strong current running through the decades of her life that includes her struggles as the financial support of her family. Malone judiciously quotes from Lenski's letters, journals, and memoirs as well as the words of her contemporary admirers and reviewers to produce an enchanting, fast-moving text.

Lenski deliberately spread her papers, background notes, research, drafts, photographs, sketches, and original illustrations over more than a dozen archives, libraries, and repositories across the United States; Malone crisscrossed the continent in search of primary source documents. The University of Oklahoma Press has produced a handsome edition embedding reproductions throughout the text. It is a delight to peruse the original endpapers for Papa Small (4), the family photographs including one of Lenski with her arms around her distinguished papa (20), and the original pencil illustrations for Strawberry Girl (152) and other works. We witness Malone's research journey as she pieces together this extraordinary writer/illustrator's life.

Malone explores Lenski's childhood, relying on her 1972 autobiography Journey into Childhood. She describes the origins of this Lutheran family whose forebears emigrated from Germany and Prussia. The paternal side settled in Michigan, where the eldest child—Lenski's father, R. C. H. Lenski—was destined to become a minister. Her mother, Marietta Young, grew up in Ohio with strong ties to Lutheranism. Lois, born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1893, was the fourth of their five children. She was raised in a parsonage whose door was never locked. Malone portrays Lenski's childhood in social and economic terms by describing the architecture, the father's income, and the specifics of the food and furnishings that were supplied to the family by the Rev. Lenski's congregants. These intimate details communicate much about the family's life in the late 1890s in a small farming community of two hundred souls. Papa Lenski was a serious and skilled photographer, and many of his photographs appear in this book.

Lois Lenski was an artist from an early age; in...