.Mjk0.MjI4Mw

Rachel Field, author of numerous children's books and plays, and the first woman to· win. the John Newber7 Medal, was born in New:Yo.rk.,Q11;y, New York. i :..• in -

1894.

":,t0c..~~J(1t.,\VlCl.S~

Her childhood was spent in this village '-1.n the western part of the state and in Springfield, •a.ssachusett s.

Aft er

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, written while a student at Radcliffe College.

9he worked under Professor Baker

when he was head of the department of drama

and

of the workshop theater there and at Harvard.

director 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 theil" 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 childrm do • .Miss Field's interest lies chiefly in American stories,

as illustrated by Hi tty: Her First Hundred Years (1929) ,the biography of a moden doll, a piece of genuine Americana, which M1ss Field and Miss Doroth) 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 vas awarded the JolJn New-

�