Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth was an American writer of fiction and poetry for children and adults. She won the 1931 Newbery Medal from the American Library Association award recognizing The Cat Who Went to Heaven as the previous year's "most distinguished contribution to Americanliterature for children." In 1968 she was a highly commended runner-up for the biennial international Hans Christian Andersen Award for children's writers. Elizabeth Coatsworth was born May 31, 1893, to Ida Reid and William T. Coatsworth, a prosperous grain merchant in Buffalo, New York. She attended Buffalo Seminary, a private girls' school, and spent summers with her family on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie. She began traveling as a child, visiting the Alps and Egypt at age five. Coatsworth graduated from Vassar College in 1915 as Salutatorian. In 1916 she received a Master of Arts from Columbia University. She then traveled to eastern Asia, riding horseback through the Philippines, exploring Indonesia and China, and sleeping in a Buddhist monastery. These travels would later influence her writing. In 1929, she married writer Henry Beston, with whom she had two daughters, Margaret and Catherine. They lived at Hingham, Massachusetts, and Chimney Farm in Nobleboro, Maine. Her daughter, Kate Barnes, would go on to become accomplished in writing in her own right, being named the first Poet Laureate of Maine. Elizabeth Coatsworth died at her home in Nobleboro, August 31, 1986. Her papers are held in the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota and Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, with a small archive from late in her career in the de Grummond Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi. There is also a collection of her papers at the Maine Women Writers Collection held at the University of New England, Portland, Maine.
Career
Coatsworth began her career publishing her poetry in magazines. Her first book was a poetry collection for adults, Fox Footprints, in 1912. A conversation with her friend, Louise Seaman, who had just founded the first children's book publishing department in the United States at Macmillan, led Coatsworth to write her first children's book, The Cat and the Captain. In 1930 The Cat Who Went to Heaven appeared. The story of an artist who is painting a picture of Buddha for a group of monks, it won the Newbery Medal for "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children". Nineteenth-Century Children's Writers says "Coatsworth reached her apogee in her nature writing, notably The Incredible Tales". These four books were published for adults in the 1950s. They tell the story of the Perdrys, a family living in the forests of northern Maine who may not be entirely human. Coatsworth had a long career, publishing over 90 books from 1910 to her autobiography and final book in 1976.
Selected works
For children
The Cat and the Captain, illustrated by Gertrude Kaye, Macmillan, 1927
The Cat Who Went to Heaven, ill. Lynd Ward Macmillan, 1930
The Golden Horseshoe, ill. Robert Lawson, Macmillan, 1935
