Enright, Elizabeth (1909–1968)

American writer for young people. Born on September 17, 1909, in Oak Park, Illinois; died on June 8, 1968; daughter of Walter J. Enright (a political cartoonist) and Maginel Wright ; studied at Edgewood School, Greenwich, Connecticut, at Art Students League of New York, 1927-28, in Paris, 1928, and at Parsons School of Design; married Robert Marty Gillham (an advertising man and television executive), on April 24, 1930; children: Nicholas Wright; Robert II; Oliver.

Began as magazine illustrator but started writing the stories to accompany her drawings and eventually stopped illustrating; was author of books for children and of short stories for adults, appearing in The New Yorker and other national magazines and published as collections; was lecturer in creative writing at Barnard College (1960–62), and at writing seminars at Indiana University, University of Connecticut, and University of Utah.

Awards, honors:

John Newbery Medal of American Library Association, 1939, for Thimble Summer; New York Herald Tribune Children's Spring Book Festival Award (1957), runner-up for Newbery Award (1958), both for Gone-Away Lake; named by American Library Association as U.S. nominee for International Hans Christian Andersen Award (1963), for outstanding literary quality of complete works; Tatsinda was an Honor Book in New York Herald Tribune Children's Spring Book Festival, 1963; LL.D., Nasson College, 1966.

Selected writings—juvenile:

Kintu: A Cargo Adventure (Farrar, 1935); Thimble Summer (Farrar, 1938); The Sea Is All Around (Farrar, 1940); The Saturdays (Farrar, 1941); The Four-Story Mistake (Farrar, 1942); Then There Were Five (Farrar, 1944); The Melendy Family (Rinehart, 1947); Christmas Tree for Lydia (Rinehart, 1951); Spiderweb for Two: A Melendy Maze (Rinehart, 1951); Gone-Away Lake (Harcourt, 1957); Return to Gone-Away (Harcourt, 1961); Tatsinda (Harcourt 1963); Zee (Harcourt 1965).

Selected writings—adult:

Borrowed Summer and Other Stories (Rinehart, 1946); The Moment Before the Rain (Harcourt, 1955); The Riddle of the Fly and Other Stories (Harcourt, 1959); Doublefields: Memories and Stories (autobiographical sketches, short stories, and one novella, Harcourt, 1966).

Bulk of short stories first published in The New Yorker, but others appeared in Ladies' Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, Redbook, Yale Review, Harper's, McCall's, and Saturday Evening Post. Her stories were included in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards (1946, 1949, 1951, 1955, 1958, 1960) and Best American Short Stories (1950, 1952, 1954). Contributed reviews of children's books to The New York Times.

Elizabeth Enright, author and illustrator of fiction for children, critic, and short-story writer for adults, was recognized as an outstanding contributor to the genres of realistic fiction and fantasy for children.

Although born in Illinois, she grew up in New York City, where from an early age she was surrounded by artists. Her parents were magazine illustrator Maginel Wright and political cartoonist Walter J. Enright. Enright studied at the Art Students League in New York from 1927 to 1928 and in Paris during 1928. She began her career as a magazine illustrator until she illustrated Marian King's book Kees in 1930. In 1935, she wrote and illustrated her first book Kintu: A Congo Adventure.

Enright was successful in creating imaginative and realistic works. "Things come back and we know them again and use them," she wrote, "and if we use them well the book seems real because in essence, if not in fact, what happens in the book has roots in what was real." Episodes, characters and locales from Enright's own childhood as well as her son's recur in her children's books. Her characters have inquiring minds and come from families where relationships are based on love and mutual support. Although her work is not devoid of the pain and conflicts of childhood, Enright stresses the joys in life. "What I think to be the means of creating believable characters in a believable story [is]: first our own experience remembered; then the observation of children themselves and respect for their vision of life, still not smudged or overlaid with the dust of repetition. Then the inward view: the deeper remembering."

In her work, Enright dealt with realism and fantasy with striking success. Critics praised her books for having "been lifted above the superficial, the ephemeral—in which one hangs on from page to page simply to find out what happens next."

Although she included elements of fantasy in her earlier fiction, Enright did not complete a book in this genre until the end of her career. Her last two works, Tatsinda and Zee, are successful combinations of fairytale tradition and original invention.