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Rachel Field, author of numerous children's books and plays, and the first woman to win the John Newbery Medal, was born in New York City, New York, in 1894. Her childhood was spent in this Stockbridge, Mass village in the western part of the state and in Springfield, Massachusetts. After graduation from the local schools she entered Radcliffe College. Her early literary interests were in poetry.

Miss Field came to attention first with a one-act play, Three Pills in a Bottle [Three Pills in a Bottle underscored], written while a student at Radcliffe College. She worked under Professor Baker when he was head of the department of drama and director of the workshop theater there and at Harvard. Many of her one-act plays are produced yearly in Little Theatres all over the United States.

Her first five years in New York were spent with a leading moving picture company in an editorial position. Since then she has devoted all of her time to the writing of fiction and poetry. Her books are known primarily as juveniles, but Miss Field, believing that children hate having their books written down to them, has carefully avoided, in verse and prose, this form of insult to the young intelligence. Adult readers have been known to like her books almost as much as children do.

Miss Field's interest lies chiefly in American stories, as illustrated by Hitty: Her First Hundred Years [Hitty: Her First Hundred Years underscored] (1929), the biography of a wooden doll, a piece of genuine Americana, which Miss Field and Miss Dorothy Lathrop, who made the drawings for the book, found in a shop on 8th Street in New York.

Thru the experiences of Hitty the history of the past hundred years is told. The book was awarded the John New-