Author Description

This best-selling children's author is well known for her touching stories about true-to-life characters and marked by striking landscapes and memorable themes of community, friendship, and human goodness. Though she came to writing relatively late in life, MacLachlan in fifteen years has produced two short story collections, seven picture books, and eight novels, including Sarah, Plain and Tall, winner of the 1986 Newbery Medal and the basis for a Hallmark Hall of Fame television production starring Glenn Close. For Sarah and its sequel, Skylark, as well as for Arthur, for the Very First Time, Cassie Binegar, Journey, and Baby, MacLachlan has earned nearly every prestigious award bestowed on children's writers, including the Golden Kite Award, ALA Notable Book citations, the Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Award, and, for the body of her work, the University of Southern Mississippi Medallion. Yet despite a glowing critical reception and a huge popular following, MacLachlan and her works have largely not received the scholarly attention they deserve. Correcting this imbalance comes David L. Russell's Patricia MacLachlan, the first full-length critical study of the writer's accomplishments to date. Organized chronologically and with an emphasis on the novels, the volume presents readers with an excellent guide to appreciating MacLachlan's contributions to and place in children's literature. A solid introduction to a writer whose celebrations of family and the human spirit are lyrical, Patricia MacLachlan will find a ready audience among scholars, librarians, and high school and college students and their teachers.