The Obituary of Elizabeth George Speare New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/16/obituaries/elizabeth-g-speare-84-author-of-children-s-historical-novels.html?pagewanted=1

Elizabeth G. Speare, 84, Author Of Children's Historical Novels
By RONALD SULLIVAN

Published: November 16, 1994
Elizabeth George Speare, an author of historical novels for children, died yesterday in Northwest General Hospital in Tucson, Ariz. She was 84.

The cause was an aortic aneurysm, her family said. Beginning in 1957 with "Calico Captive," Mrs. Speare wrote a string of novels that soon became familiar to thousands of American schoolchildren. Two of her early works, "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" (1958) and "The Bronze Bow" (1961), were awarded the Newbery Medal by the American Library Association.

Among her other novels were "Life in Colonial America" (1964) and "The Prospering" (1967).
Mrs. Speare's last book, "The Sign of the Beaver" (1983), also won the Newbery Medal, as well as the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.

In 1989, Mrs. Speare was awarded the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for her "distinguished, enduring contribution to children's literature." The award cited her "vitality and energy, grace of writing, historical accuracy, and tremendous feeling for place and character."

Her novels have continued to be required reading in classrooms across the country. Her subjects ranged from a boy heroically trying to drive the Romans from Israel to another boy's efforts to survive alone in the wilderness of colonial Maine.

"I have chosen to write historical novels, chiefly, I think, because I enjoy sharing with young people my own ever-fresh astonishment at finding that men and women and boys and girls who lived through the great events of the past were exactly like ourselves, and that they faced every day the same choices, large and small, which daily confront us," she wrote in the New York Times Book Review in 1961.

Mrs. Speare was born in 1908 and reared in Melrose, Mass. She attended Smith College and earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Boston University.

She wrote a number of magazine articles and two one-act plays before winning her first award in 1957 with the publication of "Calico Captive," the story of a young woman in 1794 who was carried away to Canada after an Indian raid.

Mrs. Speare is survived by her husband, Alden, and a daughter, Mary Elizabeth Carey of Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Correction: November 18, 1994, Friday An obituary on Wednesday about Elizabeth George Speare, an author of historical novels for children, misidentified an award received by her last book, "The Sign of the Beaver" (1983). It was a Newbery Honor Medal from the American Library Association, not a Newbery Medal. The association awarded its top honor, the Newbery Medal, to two of Mrs. Speare's other books.