Cornelia Meigs

Cornelia Meigs was born December 6, 1884, to civil engineer Montgomery C. Meigs, Jr. she attended Bryn Mawr College, receiving an A.B. degree in 1907. Meigs began writing children's books while an English teacher at St. Katherine's School in Davenport, Iowa. subsequently designated runners-up. She was one of the runners-up again in 1929 (Clearing Weather) and 1933 (Swift Rivers). Runner-up works are now called Newbery Honor Books, so latter-day editions are authorized to display a silver seal on the cover. In 1932, Meigs became a professor of English at Bryn Mawr, She died at Havre de Grace, Maryland, on September 10, 1973. Most of her papers are in the Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College. Others are in the de Grummond Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg and at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. ==Awards==

• 1915 Drama League prize, The Steadfast Princess • 1922 Newbery runner-up, Windy Hill • 1928 Newbery runner-up, Clearing Weather • 1933 Newbery runner-up, Swift Rivers • 1927 Beacon Hill Bookshelf Prize, The Trade Wind • 1934 Newbery Medal, Invincible Louisa • 1963 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, Invincible Louisa ==Letter==

For a glimpse into her life, here are excerpts from a letter sent to an Albert Northrop, presumed husband to her niece Elizabeth (Betty): January 29, 1950. Dear Albert, Your nice birthday letter should have had an answer long before this, but so many things do seem to come between me and writing even the letters that I want so much to write. The birthday was a very portentous one, my sixty-fifth, which means I am no longer eligible for Bryn Mawr after June; they have to keep me until then. By a singular chance they have given me more work to do than ever before, quite regardless of the fact that in six months I shall be considered totally unfit ... You were so good to speak so kindly of Violent Men and Two Arrows. The former had been in hand for a very long time, quite the largest piece of work I had ever undertaken, but it has been the one that I most enjoyed. I have a real passion for history, which grows as the years go by, and was whetted ever more by my seeing some of it being made first hand while I was doing a very humble job in Washington. I realized that if I did not finish it while I was at Bryn Mawr I never would, so I finally succeeded in getting it finished and out of my hands. The Macmillan Company had it for a long time before they published it, so, since I had promised a child's book as the very next thing, I wrote that last year and they came out rather embarrassingly close together. You were a very good friend to read them both. You always give such nice detailed comments, not like the reviewers, or sometimes even the writer of the blurb on the cover who have visibly not got much farther than Chapter six or so ... Nina (signed in her hand) ==Selected works==

, The Windy Hill Children's fiction • The Kingdom of the Winding Road, The Macmillan Company, 1915 • ''Master Simon's Garden'', Macmillan, 1916 • The Pool of Stars, Macmillan, 1919 • The Windy Hill, Macmillan, 1921 • The Trade Wind, Little, Brown & Co., 1927 • The Wonderful Locomotive, Macmillan, 1928 • Clearing Weather, Little Brown, 1928 • The Crooked Apple Tree, Little Brown, 1929 • Swift Rivers, Macmillan, 1934 • The Covered Bridge, Macmillan, 1936 • Young Americans, Ginn & Co., 1936 • The Scarlet Oak, Macmillan, 1938 • Call of the Mountain, Little Brown, 1940 • The Two Arrows, Macmillan, 1949 • The Dutch Colt, Macmillan, 1952 • Wild Geese Flying, Macmillan, 1957 • Mystery at the Red House, Macmillan, 1961 • Willow Whistle • As the Crow Flies • The Mounted Messenger • The New Moon • Rain on the Roof • The Vanished Island • Wind in the Chimney • Fair Wind to Virginia Fiction as Adair Aldon • The Island of Appledore, Macmillan, 1917 • The Pirate of Jasper Peak, Macmillan, 1918 • At the Sign of the Two Heroes, The Century Company, 1920 • The Hill of Adventure, Century, 1922 Plays • The Steadfast Princess, Macmillan, 1916 • Helga and the White Peacock, Macmillan, 1922 Biographies • Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of "Little Women", Little Brown, 1933 • Jane Adams: Pioneer for Social Justice: A Biography, Little Brown, 1970 For adults • Railroad West, Little Brown, 1937, (novel) • The Violent Men: A Study of Human Relations in the First American Congress, Macmillan, 1949 • ''A Critical History of Children's Literature: A Survey of Children's Books in English from Earliest Times to the Present, Prepared in Four Parts Under the Editorship of Cornelia Meigs'', Macmillan, 1953 (624pp); Cornelia Meigs with Anne Thaxter Eaton, Elizabeth Nesbitt and Ruth Hill Viguers : Second edition, ''A Critical History of Children's Literature: A Survey of Children's Books in English'', Macmillan, 1969 (708pp) • What Makes a College? A History of Bryn Mawr, Macmillan, 1956 ==References==