Biography
Jean Little was born in Taiwan. Her parents were Canadian doctors serving as medical missionaries under the United Church of Canada. The Little family came home to live in Canada in 1939, moving to Guelph in 1940. Although Jean was legally blind from birth, she attended elementary and secondary school in regular classes. She went to the University of Toronto and got her BA in English Language and Literature.
After teaching disabled children for several years, Jean Little wrote her first children’s novel, Mine for Keeps, about a child with cerebral palsy. It won the Little, Brown Canadian Children’s Book Award and was published in 1962. Since then, Jean has had 44 other books published. She has written novels, picture books, poetry, short stories, and two autobiographical books. She has also written a novel about her mother’s childhood called, His Banner Over Me. She has won literary awards for her work and has been published internationally.
She has taught Children’s Literature at the University of Guelph where she is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of English. She has six honorary degrees and is a Member of the Order of Canada. She has journeyed widely talking to both adults and children themselves about the joys to be found through reading and writing. In March 2004 she went to India and in November 2006 to Bulgaria.
She lives in Guelph, Ontario with her sister Pat, her great niece Jeanie, and her great nephew Ben. She writes with a talking computer and travels with her Seeing Eye dog Honey. She is at work on a novel.
Read more about this topic: Jean Little
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)