CUSHMAN, Karen 1941-

PERSONAL: Born October 4, 1941, in Chicago, IL; daughter of Arthur and Loretta (Heller) Lipski; married Philip Cushman (a professor), September 6, 1969; children: Leah. Education: Stanford University, B.A., 1963; United States International University (San Diego, CA), M.A. (human behavior), 1977; John F. Kennedy University (Orinda, CA), M.A. (museum studies), 1986. Religion: "Secular humanist." Hobbies and other interests: Working in the garden—especially growing tomatoes, reading, medieval music.

ADDRESSES: Home—Vashon Island, WA. Agent—James Levine, 330 Seventh Ave., New York, NY 10001.

CAREER: Writer, 1990—. John F. Kennedy University, Orinda, CA, adjunct professor in Museum Studies Department, beginning 1986.

AWARDS, HONORS: Carl Sandburg Award for Children's Literature, Golden Kite Award, Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, both 1994, Newbery Honor Book, American Library Association (ALA), Best Books for Young Adults and Recommended Books for Reluctant Readers, ALA/Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), and Pick of the Lists selection, American Booksellers' Association, all 1995, and Honour List, International Board on Books for Young People, 1996, all for Catherine, Called Birdy; Newbery Medal, ALA, Notable Children's Book selection and Quick Pick for Young Adults selection, ALA, Notable Trade Book in the English Arts, National Council of Teachers of English, and Best Books for Young Adults, ALA/YALSA, 1995, for The Midwife's Apprentice; John and Patricia Beatty Award, California Library Association, and Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, National Council for the Social Studies/Children's Book Council, both 1997, both for The Ballad of Lucy Whipple.

WRITINGS:

Catherine, Called Birdy, Clarion (New York, NY), 1994.

The Midwife's Apprentice, Clarion (New York, NY), 1995.

The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, Clarion (New York, NY), 1996.

Matilda Bone, Clarion (New York, NY), 2000.

Rodzina, Clarion (New York, NY), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Author Karen Cushman features "strong, spirited, willful, and independent young women" in her novels aimed at the young adult audience, as a critic for the St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers noted. Cushman sets these resourceful female protagonists in historical periods as varied as the Middle Ages and the American nineteenth century. "Though centuries distant, they have the same desires as contemporary young women," according to the same contributor. Cushman thus provides readers with compelling coming-of-age tales as well as history primers noted for their accuracy and attention to detail.

The tired adage "better late than never," however, takes on new meaning when applied to this writer. Beginning her writing career at age fifty, she took over three years to write her first young adult novel, Catherine, Called Birdy. This story of a thirteen-year-old girl who tries to control her own destiny in the medieval world won numerous awards, including a prestigious Newbery Honor Book. But Cushman is a fast study. Her second published work, The Midwife's Apprentice, also set in the Middle Ages and featuring a young female protagonist, took just six months to write and earned her the Newbery Medal. "I've always been a late bloomer," Cushman explained in an interview with CA. "But I always eventually bloom. Here I am making a new career late in life and having a wonderful time." Her subsequent novels include The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, Matilda Bone, and Rodzina.

Changing careers and change in general is something Cushman seems quite at home with. Born in a suburb of Chicago in 1941, just before the United States entered World War II, she moved with her family to Tarzana in southern California at age eleven. As she told Achuka Online's Cheryl Bowlan, "I was not thrilled with California. It was too hot. I missed my grandparents, my dog and my public library." The adolescent Cushman soon adapted to her new environment, however. A self-proclaimed avid reader as a child, Cushman found the local library in her new hometown and that helped to make her feel more settled. Soon she was helping herself to the wonders this new library had to offer. "Fiction was my favorite, but I would get these wild passions and read all there was on the Civil War for instance, or on the physiology of the brain. I guess this kind of curiosity explains my later fascination with the Middle Ages." Attending Catholic school through high school, Cushman received an education that "was more controlled than inspired. I remember coming home from the first grade with all the books for the entire year and reading them the first night and then crying all night because I knew I would be stuck with those same books all year long."

Fantasy worlds played an important part in her private education. "I used to hold plays with my neighborhood friends," Cushman once recalled for CA. "One time I got hold of a book on ballet, and I had my friends take a ballet class, gripping the car door handles like a ballet bar as I read to them what to do." Her younger brother's homemade scooter provided another outlet: "I used to borrow that scooter and take off and imagine myself going all around the world, which is sort of what I do now, only I travel backwards in time in my writing." Writing was an early avocation as well, and once her talents for poems and stories were discovered by classmates and teachers, Cushman was in demand for everything from valedictory speeches to writing contests. "I used to write poems and short stories for myself at this time," Cushman once told CA. "Recently, I came across a play I wrote in junior high—'Jingle Bagels,' a sort of multicultural Christmas story. I also wrote several possible plots for new Elvis movies."

Upon graduation from high school, Cushman won a scholarship that would allow her to attend any college in the United States, and more by accident than design, she attended Stanford. "I never thought about writing as a profession or as a way to make a living. No one I knew made their living that way. I thought I might want to take creative writing in college, but that's as far as the ambition went." However, Stanford offered no undergraduate creative writing major, so Cushman began with the next best thing, English. "But I liked the wrong kinds of books," she once recalled. Soon she was also studying Greek and began dreaming of a career in archaeology. Her writing, however, stopped for a time. "Writing was a thing I did to ventilate my feelings or to celebrate. But at Stanford there were all these semi-intellectual East Coast types who read [Albert] Camus, and I felt very intimidated about sharing my writing with them. To be honest, the whole experience at Stanford was bit intimidating."

"After graduation, I wanted to dig for treasures on the Acropolis by moonlight," Cushman once told J. Sydney Jones in an interview for Something about the Author (SATA). "Instead, I got a job as a customer service representative for Pacific Bell in Beverly Hills." Several jobs later, she was working at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, where she met her future husband, then a rabbinic student. Together, the two packed up for Oregon, where her husband found a job at a small college and "where I wove and made blackberry jam and had a daughter, Leah," Cushman once recalled. After two years, the family returned to California, where both Cushman and her husband earned master's degrees in counseling and human behavior. Her husband went on to get his doctorate in psychology, set up a private practice, and become a professor and respected writer in the field of psychotherapy. Cushman, meanwhile, studied for a second master's—in museum studies—and became an adjunct faculty member at John F. Kennedy University, where she has edited Museum Studies Journal, taught classes in museology and material culture, and coordinated the master's project program. "Museum studies was an interesting way for me to put together many of the things that interest me in life. I am fascinated about the concept of what artifacts say about a culture, and also which artifacts are saved and why others are not."

But increasingly her interests focused on writing again. "Over the years, I did a lot of reading of children's books to and with my daughter," Cushman once told SATA. "When we got to young adult literature, I just stayed there while she went on to adult books. There is something about the themes of these books that appeal to me—coming of age, the acceptance of responsibility, and development of compassion. I was always coming up with great ideas for books and sharing them with my husband. And finally one day in 1989, when I told him this great idea for a book set in the medieval world, he just told me he didn't want to hear any more about it until it was down on paper." Cushman accepted the challenge and sketched out the book in seven pages. That, however, was the easy part. What followed was another three years of research into the medieval world, discovering "what it might have been like for a girl during the Middle Ages," as she once told SATA.

Methodical in her approach, Cushman first read some of the better-known writers of historical fiction for young adults, including Rosemary Sutcliff and Patricia MacLachlan. In an interview with Amy Umland Love for Publishers Weekly, she said that she especially admired the "simple and polished prose" of these two. She also attended writers' conferences but got little help from these until the day she heard one speaker who was not dealing out inside tips on marketing or on hot topics, but who simply advised to write from the heart.

For Cushman, this simple piece of advice was a revelation, giving her confidence to follow her own passions and instincts. Her career in museum studies was helpful in giving her access to material on the culture of the medieval world; she also heavily researched the period, using records of the time, including one thirteenth-century book on manners that contained such sage advice as not to blow one's nose on the tablecloth. The distance in time and philosophy afforded by writing about the Middle Ages also allowed Cushman to take a fresh look at the role of women in society. The transition from the medieval period to the Renaissance with its increased intellectual turmoil is mirrored in the rite of passage of an adolescent girl: in this case, young Catherine, who is nicknamed Birdy. "There was a change toward personal accountability and emphasis on the development of privacy," Cushman said in her Publishers Weekly interview. Yet this personal accountability was stymied in the case of young women of the thirteenth century, as it often still is. "Everything I had read about children's books or had heard at conferences told me the child should solve the problem," Cushman once explained to SATA. In the case of Birdy, and in most instances involving children, that simply is not true, Cushman believes. "What I wanted to show with Catherine was what a child would do in a situation she could not control and for which she had no options."

The resulting story is told in diary form: "I am bit by fleas and plagued by my family. That is all there is to say." So begins Catherine's personal description of her fourteenth year. She lives in a room full of caged birds and keeps this journal, initially, as a form of discipline for being so self-willed and headstrong. She resists not only her mother's campaign to make her a lady, but also her father's to marry her off to an older landowner she calls Shaggy Beard. Birdy writes that in fact she and her friend Aelis are in "grave danger of being sold like pigs at autumn fair." Her account of her daily adventures takes the reader through an entire year of medieval life in an English manor house in Lincolnshire. There are fairs and feasts, planting and harvesting, difficult births, pitiful deaths, and drunken weddings all described in vivid detail. The harsh realities of life in the Middle Ages are not glossed over: the smells of dung heaps and raw sewage, the bone-strewn floor of the manor, and the total lack of privacy are all minutely presented.

Birdy continues to resist her father's attempts at marrying her off by blacking out her teeth when one suitor comes calling and setting the privy on fire with another suitor still in it. She would much rather marry some swashbuckler like her Uncle George, the Crusader. But Birdy, like the caged birds all around her, ultimately is trapped. In her case, the imprisonment is the marriage—not with Shaggy Beard, but to his somewhat less offensive son. However, by accepting this match, she achieves a new level of maturity and understanding.

At the end of Cushman's three years of writing, she worked with another Oakland writer, Sandy Boucher, to clean up the manuscript and then sent it off to her husband's agent, who quickly found a publisher. If the writing was long and difficult, getting published was something of a cakewalk for Cushman. "I was very lucky," she once told SATA. Critical response made the effort all worthwhile. Jane Langton noted in the New York Times Book Review that it is the very process of maturation in the protagonist that makes the novel work: "Birdy's progress toward becoming Catherine is the true grist of the story," Langton wrote. Voice of Youth Advocates Rebecca Barnhouse praised the novel for its realism: "The novel succeeds because of the attention to detail in both the historical setting and in the development of the delightful character of Catherine." Deborah Stevenson commented in the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books that Birdy seems endowed with a modern sensibility and that Cushman "writes with vigor and craft of a life most young people won't have contemplated but will find fascinating here," while Ann A. Flowers noted in Horn Book that Catherine's rebelliousness and curiosity mixed with kindness make her "an amusing and sympathetic figure," concluding that the book is "fascinating and thought-provoking." And School Library Journal critic Bruce Anne Shook called Catherine "a feminist far ahead of her time" and summed up the book as a whole as "superb historical fiction."

"I still take that seven-page synopsis of the book with me when talking in the schools," Cushman once told SATA. "For me, it's a symbol—it's great to have ideas, but ideas alone are not enough. We have to be willing to act on them." And act on them, Cushman did. The first novel was off in the mail to her agent when she began her second book, also set in the Middle Ages which she knows so well. In this next tale, however, she left the world of the manor house for the life of commoners. "The Midwife's Apprentice grew from the title and an image of a nameless, homeless girl sleeping on a dung heap," Cushman once told SATA. "I could see this girl crawling out of the warm spot she had created for herself in the heap, sort of exploding out of it like she herself was being born." This Newbery medal-winning book is also considerably shorter than the first. (Cushman had to edit out forty pages of the original manuscript of Catherine, Called Birdy.) With The Midwife's Apprentice, she wrote a book thinner in secondary characters, but one every bit as rich in period detail. The story opens on a frosty morning early in the fourteenth century in a nameless English village with a preteen girl known as Brat, sleeping on a dung heap for warmth. The girl is described as "unwashed, unnourished, unloved, and unlovely." A voice awakens her, and Brat sees a formidable looking woman called Jane the Midwife standing over her. Jane takes in this waif and turns her into her apprentice, seeing the girl initially as free labor.

Up to this time, Brat has led a hand-to-mouth existence, a child of the streets in modern jargon. Such a life has given Brat a certain wisdom regarding her fellow humans, but not much hope. Slowly, however, Brat begins to develop a sense of self and of hope. She also acquires her own name: Alyce. "Alyce is every child who is parentless, homeless, and hungry, who lives on the edges of our world, who is mocked or excluded for being different," asserted Cushman in her Newbery Medal acceptance speech, published in Horn Book. Through aiding in the delivery of twin calves and her first successful delivery of a baby, Brat/Alyce grows in confidence and spirit. By the end of the book she has learned the powerful lesson that "trying and failing are not the same as failing without ever trying," according to Barnhouse in another Voice of Youth Advocates article. Sara Miller wrote in School Library Journal that Cushman tells her story with "simplicity, wit, and humor," making The Midwife's Apprentice "a delightful introduction to a world seldom seen in children's literature." A reviewer for Booklist also commented on Cushman's directness of approach: "Cushman writes with sharp simplicity and a pulsing beat…. Kids will be caught up in this short, fast-paced narrative." And a Kirkus Reviews critic called the book "a rouser for all times."

Cushman's third book is also historical fiction, though the time period is some five hundred years later. Set during the California Gold Rush, The Ballad of Lucy Whipple tells the story of a young girl dragged "like a barrel of lard" from her quiet Massachusetts home to the noise, adventure, and dirt of the California gold country. Twelve-year-old California Morning Whipple is distraught at the move but must help her mother run a boarding house. Morning soon renames herself Lucy and starts a pie business to follow her own dream: she longs to return to her home in the East. However, finally presented with the chance to return, Lucy suddenly learns that home is not a geographical location, but the people she is with and the experiences she has every day. For the time being, home is where Lucy is in California.

Part of the inspiration for this story was a fact Cushman stumbled across in her reading: Some ninety percent of those who came to the Gold Rush were men. "And I asked myself, what about the other ten percent? The women and children? Why did they come? What about their stories?" Another inspiration was Cushman's own removal to California from Chicago as a young girl and the subsequent dislocation she felt. Cushman set the story in the fictional mining camp of Lucky Diggings, which is in the northern mines. "I wanted there to be inclement weather, and I also wanted the miners to be doing wet mining," Cushman once told SATA. Two years of research and writing went into the book. "I found it harder to learn about the everyday life of women and children in California of the nineteenth century than I did in thirteenth-century England. Everybody was too busy working, I guess, to keep records." One invaluable source was a set of letters sent back East to a sister by the wife of a miner. The Ballad of Lucy Whipple again contained several of Cushman's usual motifs and themes: the spirited adolescent girl, the change of name, the will and dream at the center of things.

Reviewers responded positively to this third novel as they had to the previous two. Linda Perkins, writing in the New York Times Book Review, praised Cushman for not simply sticking with her winning formula of following the coming-of-age pains of a girl in medieval England, noting that The Ballad of Lucy Whipple is evidence that Cushman's "early honors were not just beginner's luck." Perkins also commended Cushman for "recreat[ing] a time and place in gritty detail," and for "hold[ing] the reader's nose up to the stench of history," something not usually done in young adult historical fiction. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly remarked on the author's accuracy in portraying Lucy's emotional turbulence, employing "a voice so heartbreakingly bitter that readers can taste her homesickness." Bruce Anne Shook, writing in School Library Journal, also commented that the "historical setting is authentically portrayed" and that the "heroine is a delightful character." A critic for Kirkus Reviews found that Cushman's third novel was "less a period piece than a timeless and richly comic coming-of-age story," while the Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that Cushman's novel was "a coming-of-age story rich with historical flavor."

Following dreams is what has allowed Cushman such success with her books. Returning to the Middle Ages for her fourth book, Matilda Bone, she found the research into medieval cures with leeches and blood-letting "gross enough for the average seventh grader and me," as she once noted for SATA. She is also constantly learning about her craft. "So much of writing is unconscious and intuitive," she once explained. "I have never been plot-conscious. I personally love to read books that have strong plot and strong characters. But when I sit down to write a book, I don't have this structure in mind. I simply want to tell a story about a person's life and how that life changes day to day. I don't consciously think of the audience as I am writing, and I certainly do not wonder if the vocabulary level is correct or not. I just tell a story the way it has to be told. For me, historical fiction is the place where story and setting come together. Historical fiction allows all of us, including kids, to look at today's problems through a prism, to get literal distance on our own problems. I hope my books help kids to see beyond their own experiences, and see themselves as part of the sweep of history instead of an isolated vignette." Speaking with Bowlan, Cushman further elaborated on her craft: "Every time I get an idea for a story, that's what draws me. It's not that I think, oh, it's time for another American book, or it's time for an English book. It's the story and the character I seem to want to get involved with."

Matilda Bone tells the story of a young girl who has been raised by a priest, Father Leufredus, and brought up in the rarefied environment of an English manor house in the Middle Ages. At thirteen, Matilda suddenly finds herself apprenticed to a bone-setter, Red Peg. At first out of her element in Blood and Bone Alley, Matilda priggishly uses Latin in daily conversation and is appalled at the domestic conditions at Peg's. Reared on dreams of saintliness, she at first misunderstands and overlooks the basic goodness in Peg and her cohorts. She longs to return to Randall Manor and her studies. Matilda's abilities in reading and writing come in less handy than skill at hard work and compassion; Peg lets her pious new apprentice slowly come round and follow her own example of helping those less fortunate.

This fourth novel was less well-received critically than Cushman's previous titles. Booklist's Ilene Cooper noted that unlike the author's earlier novels, "setting not character takes precedence" in Matilda Bone. Cooper felt that it was "easy to lose track of Matilda's evolution" amidst the array of historical detail served up in the book. A contributor for Publishers Weekly had similar reservations, remarking that fans of Cushman's previous novels "may be disappointed with this historical adventure" because Matilda "is less winning than her supporting cast." Yet other reviewers found the book more laudable. Horn Book's Susan P. Bloom assured readers that Cushman's voluminous research into medieval medical lore "is just as interesting as Matilda's tale." Kit Vaughan, writing in School Library Journal, also found Matilda Bone praiseworthy, calling it a "fascinating glimpse into the colorful life and times of the fourteenth century." Vaughan concluded that this "humorous, frank look" at medicine as practiced over half a millennium ago "shows readers that love and compassion, laughter, and companionship, are indeed the best medicine."

Cushman once again turns away from medieval themes to deal with the American West in the 2003 Rodzina. As a contributor for Publishers Weekly noted of the title, Cushman serves up "another feisty heroine," but this time the youthful protagonist, twelve-year-old Rodzina, is being shipped West on an orphan train in the 1880s. Part of a larger project in social engineering in which nineteenth-century orphans and street children were sent out of urban settings to be adopted by rural parents, Rodzina sets out from Chicago in the company of legions of other orphans. Big for her age, she is put in charge of other children on the train. Twice she is sent to homes along the train route, and twice she manages to escape cruel conditions, expected to work nonstop as nursemaid and farmhand or to fill the soon-vacant bed of a settler whose wife is in terminal condition. She finally makes it to Oakland, basking in the sunshine of California, where, as Horn Book's Martha V. Parravano wrote, "readers can bet with confidence on plenty of good things happening for her." Kliatt's Claire Rosser felt that young adult readers "will enjoy this well-written novel." Rosser further commended Cushman for creating a "strong heroine in terrible circumstances, who finds a way to not just survive but to create a life with real possibilities." A critic for Kirkus Reviews called the story's ending "agreeable," further commenting that Cushman, "as usual conveys a contemporary feel without anachronism." And Booklist's Hazel Rochman thought that the book was a "natural for American history or social studies classes."

Since earning the Newbery Medal and critical acclaim for her novels, Cushman has spent more time in schools talking with children and is heartened by what she has seen. "It has pleased me to see so many kids still reading and plenty for whom it is a real passion." Among these, there are also aspiring writers, and her advice to these kids is the same as she told Publishers Weekly: "Go with your passion." Speaking with another Publishers Weekly contributor, Leonard S. Marcus, Cushman shared what she felt was the best part of being a writer. Noting that she dedicated her first book to her daughter and her daughter's friends, whom she had watched grow up, she told Marcus that these young women "taught me a lot about girls—that girls can, for instance, be more independent-minded than I as a girl ever realized." Cushman further explained, "They were an inspiration to me. As a writer, I in turn am glad to have the chance to inspire other girls."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Volume 9, Beacham Publishing (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Children's Literature Review, Volume 55, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998, pp. 55-75.

Cushman, Karen, Catherine, Called Birdy, Clarion (New York, NY), 1994.

Cushman, Karen, The Midwife's Apprentice, Clarion (New York, NY), 1995.

Cushman, Karen, The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, Clarion (New York, NY), 1996.

St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Something about the Author, Volume 89, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

periodicals

Booklist, April 15, 1994, p. 1526; March 15, 1995, review of The Midwife's Apprentice, p. 1328; April 1, 1995, p. 1399; August, 1997, Barbara Baskin, review of Catherine, Called Birdy, p. 1920; December 15, 1997, Jeanette Larson, review of The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, p. 711; March 1, 1999, Sally Estes, review of The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, p. 1212; April 1, 2000, Ilene Cooper, review of The Midwife's Apprentice, p. 1479; June 1, 2000, Stephanie Zvirin, review of The Midwife's Apprentice, p. 1875; August, 2000, Ilene Cooper, review of Matilda Bone, p. 2131; November 15, 2000, Stephanie Zvirin, review of Catherine, Called Birdy, p. 632; March 1, 2003, Hazel Rochman, review of Rodzina, p. 1207.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, June, 1994, Deborah Stevenson, review of Catherine, Called Birdy, p. 316.

Horn Book, July-August, 1994, Ann A. Flowers, review of Catherine, Called Birdy, pp. 457-458; July-August, 1995, p. 465; July-August, 1996, Karen Cushman, "Newbery Medal Acceptance," pp. 413-419; November, 2000, Susan P. Bloom, review of Matilda Bone, p. 753; May-June 2003, Martha V. Parravano, review of Rodzina, p. 342.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1995, review of The Midwife's Apprentice, p. 380; June 15, 1996, review of The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, pp. 869-897; March 15, 2003, review of Rodzina, p. 464.

Kliatt, July, 2003, Claire Rosser, review of Rodzina, pp. 8-9.

New York Times Book Review, August 28, 1994, Jane Langton, review of Catherine, Called Birdy, p. 20; September 24, 1995, p. 29; February 16, 1997, Linda Perkins, review of The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, p. 25.

Publishers Weekly, April 11, 1994, p. 66; July 4, 1994, Amy Umland Love, "Flying Starts: Seven Talents New to the Children's Book Scene Talk about Their Debuts," pp. 39-40; February 27, 1995, p. 104; May 15, 1995, p. 75; May 18, 1998, review of The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, p. 82; February 14, 2000, Leonard S. Marcus, "Talking with Authors," p. 98; September 4, 2000, review of Matilda Bone, p. 109; January 13, 2003, review of Rodzina, pp. 60-61.

School Library Journal, June, 1994, Bruce Anne Shook, review of Catherine, Called Birdy, p. 147; May, 1995, Sara Miller, review of The Midwife's Apprentice, p. 118; August, 1996, Bruce Anne Shook, review of The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, p. 142; September, 2000, Kit Vaughan, review of Matilda Bone, p. 225.

Voice of Youth Advocates, June, 1994, Rebecca Barnhouse, review of Catherine, Called Birdy, p. 81; August, 1995, Rebecca Barnhouse, review of The Midwife's Apprentice, pp. 156-157.

online

Achuka Online, http://www.achuka.co.uk/special/cushman.htm/ (September 9, 2003), Cheryl Bowlan, "Interview with Karen Cushman."

Houghton Mifflin Education Place Web site, http://www.eduplace.com/author/ (September 9, 2003).

Houghton Mifflin Web site, http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/ (September 9, 2003).