Origins
When Konigsburg submitted Mixed‑Up Files to Jean Karl at Atheneum in 1966, she was an unpublished mother of three children living in the suburbs of New York City.
One inspiration for the novel was a page-one story in the New York Times on October 26, 1965. Konigsburg recalled years later that the Metropolitan Museum had purchased for only $225 a plaster and stucco statue from the time of the Italian Renaissance. "They knew they had an enormous bargain."
Another inspiration was complaints by Konigsburg's children in Yellowstone National Park, about a picnic with many amenities of home. She inferred that if they ever ran away "hey would certainly never consider any place less elegant than the Metropolitan Museum of Art".
The author's two younger children Laurie and Ross (who turned eleven and nine in 1967) posed for the illustrations of Claudia and Jamie. Anita Brigham, a neighbor in their Port Chester, New York, apartment house posed as Mrs. Frankweiler.
The character of Mrs. Frankweiler was based on Headmistress Olga Pratt at Bartram's School for Girls in Jacksonville, Florida, where Konigsburg once taught chemistry. "Miss Pratt was not wealthy, but she was a matter-of-fact person. Kind, but firm."
Read more about this topic: From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
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