Elizabeth Enright - Career

Career

Beginning as a magazine illustrator, in 1930 Enright illustrated Marion King's Kees. At one point Enright developed a series of sketches with an African flair. She then wrote a story to go with them, and in 1935 her first book, Kintu: A Congo Adventure was published. It is significant that reviewers sometimes preferred the story over the pictures, as this encouraged Enright to turn more and more to writing. After 1951 her children's books were illustrated by other artists.

Her next book, Thimble Summer, blended memories of summers spent on Frank Lloyd Wright's farm in Wisconsin and family stories from her mother and grandmother. It received the Newbery Medal for 1939, making Enright, at thirty, one of the youngest writers ever to win the award.

Enright's Gone-Away Lake appeared in 1957 and became a Newbery Honor book. It also received the New York Herald Tribune's Children's Spring Book Festival Award. In 1963 the American Library Association named Gone-Away Lake as the U.S. nominee for the international Hans Christian Andersen Award, and in 1970 it received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. The first editions of Gone-Away Lake and its sequel, Return to Gone-Away, were illustrated by Joe and Beth Krush. The most recently reissued American editions of the Gone-Away books featured cover art by Harry Potter illustrator Mary GrandPre, but retained the Krushes' textual illustrations.

Enright also wrote the popular Melendy Quartet, a series of four children's novels published between 1941 and 1951: The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mistake, Then There Were Five and Spiderweb for Two. This series tells the adventures of four siblings who live in New York with their father, a writer, and a housekeeper named Cuffy.

Tatsinda, a traditional fairy tale, was named an Honor Book in the 1963 New York Herald Tribune's Children's Spring Book Festival. Enright's final children's book, the story of a naughty fairy named Zeee, appeared in 1966.

Enright's short stories for adult readers were published in The New Yorker, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, The Yale Review, Harper's Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. They have been reprinted in anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories (1951, 1952) and O. Henry Prize Stories (1946, 1949, 1950, 1960); and were collected in Borrowed Summer and Other Stories, The Moment Before the Rain, and The Riddle of the Fly. Her final book, Doublefields: Memories and Stories, is a combination of short fiction and tales from her own life experiences.