Marie Hall Ets

Marie Hall Ets (December 16, 1895 – January 17, 1984) was an American writer and illustrator who is best known for children's picture books.

Marie Hall Ets
Born	(1895-12-16)December 16, 1895 Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Died	January 17, 1984(1984-01-17) (aged 88) Inverness, Florida
Nationality	American
Known for	Illustration
Spouse(s)	Milton Rodig ​ (m. 1917⁠–⁠1918)​ ,[1] Harold Norris Ets ​ ​ (m. 1930⁠–⁠1943)​ [2]
Awards	Caldecott Medal (1960)

Life

Marie Hall Ets was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on December 16, 1895. She attended Lawrence College. In 1918, she journeyed to Chicago where she became a social worker at the Chicago Commons, a settlement house on the northwest side of the city.^[1]

In 1960 Ets won the annual Caldecott Medal for her illustrations of Nine Days to Christmas, for which she also co-authored text with Aurora Labastida.^[3] Five of her titles were runners-up for that honor between 1945 and 1966, a record surpassed only by Maurice Sendak.^[3][a]

Just Me and In the Forest are both Caldecott Honor books. The black-and-white charcoal illustrations in Just Me "almost take on the appearance of woodcuts" and are similar in style to the illustrations in In the Forest.^[4] Constantine Georgiou comments in Children and Their Literature that Ets' "picture stories and easy-to-read books" (along with those of Maurice Sendak) "are filled with endearing and quaint human touches, putting them at precisely the right angle to life in early childhood."^[5] Play With Me, says Georgiou, is "a tender little tale, delicately illustrated in fragile pastels that echo the quiet mood of the story."^[6]

In 1970, her transcription of the autobiographical stories of Ines Cassettari, whom she met in Chicago in the years following World War I, was published as Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant.^[7]

Ets died in Inverness, Florida, on January 17, 1984.^[1]

Selected works

• Mister Penny (Viking Press, 1935)
• The Story of a Baby, 1939
• In the Forest, 1944^[b]
• My Dog Rinty, 1946, by Ellen Terry
• Oley, the Sea monster, 1947
• Little Old Automobile, 1948
• Mr. T. W. Anthony Woo: the story of a cat and a dog and a mouse, 1951^[b]
• Beasts and Nonsense, 1952
• Another Day, 1953
• Play With Me, 1955^[b]
• Mister Penny's Race Horse, 1956^[b]
• Cow's Party, 1958
• Nine Days to Christmas (Viking, 1959), text with Aurora Labastida
• Mister Penny's Circus, 1961
• Gilberto and the Wind, 1963
• Automobiles for Mice, 1964
• Just Me, 1965^[b]
• Bad Boy, Good Boy, 1967
• Talking Without Words: I Can. Can You?, 1968
• Rosa, the Life of an Italian Immigrant (transcribed by Ets), 1970; second edition, 1999, University of Wisconsin Press
• Elephant in a Well, 1972
• Jay Bird, 1974

Notes

1. Since 1971 the runners-up are called Caldecott Honor Books, but some runners-up had been identified annually and all those runners-up were retroactively named Caldecott Honor Books. The number of Honors or runners-up had always been one to five, and it had been two to four since 1994, until five were named in 2013 and six in 2015. The Honor Books must be a subset of the runners-up on the final ballot, either the leading runners-up on that ballot or the leaders on one further ballot that excludes the winner.
2. A Caldecott Honor Book

References

1. Perez, Celia C. "Biographical Sketch - Marie Hall Ets". School of Information Sciences. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Archived from the original on September 3, 2017. Retrieved 3 September 2017.
2. Pamela Dear (28 January 2000). Contemporary Authors New Revision. Gale Research Inc; Revised edition. pp. 85–. ISBN 978-0787630959.
3. "Caldecott Medal & Honor Books, 1938–Present". Association for Library Service to Children. American Library Association. Retrieved 2013-05-05.
4. Peterson, Linda Kauffman; Marilyn Leather Solt (1982). Newberry and Caldecott Medal and Honor Books: an annotated bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. p. 333. ISBN 0-8161-8448-8.
5. Georgiou, Constantine (1969). Children and Their Literature. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. p. 81.
6. Georgiou (1969), p. 100.
7. James Ciment; John Radzilowski (17 March 2015). American Immigration: An Encyclopedia of Political, Social, and Cultural Change. Routledge. pp. 189–. ISBN 978-1-317-47717-4.

Additional sources

• Jean Beccone (1976). Marie Hall Ets: Her Life and Works. University of Minnesota Press.