Articles: Authors and Illustrators: Virginia Lee Burton
Virginia Lee Burton was born on August 30th, 1909 in Newton Center, Massachusetts. Her father was the first dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When she was 8 years old, the family moved to California for the benefit of her mother’s health. They eventually settled in Carmel.
As a child, Virginia Lee Burton enjoyed dancing and appeared in as many local productions as possible. Rather than attend college, she decided to go to the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where she had landed a scholarship. The Golden Gate Bridge had not yet been built, so she spent two hours traveling each way by train, ferry, and cable car between Alameda, where she lived, and San Francisco. The commute gave her ample time to perfect sketching on the fly, which she would later put to good use.
While at art school, she continued to study dance on the side and became good enough to be offered a dance contract in New York. By 1928, though, her parents had divorced and her father had moved back to Massachusetts. Just as she was about to launch a career in dance, her father broke his leg, so she gave up her dream and moved home to take care of him. She ended up taking a sketching job with the former Boston Transcript and enrolling in a drawing class with the noted sculptor, George Demetrios. That proved a fateful decision. They married six months later, settling in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where they raised two sons who would help inspire her future books.
When her eldest son was three and a half years old, Burton wrote her first story and tried to sell it, but 13 publishers firmly rejected it. Soon after that she wrote Choo Choo: the Story of a Little Engine Who Ran Away. Her approach to storytelling was unique: she drew pictures first, until she was satisfied, and only then did she add text. A publisher bought Choo Choo and so began her career for which she is well known.
In all, Virginia Lee Burton authored seven self-illustrated children’s picture books, including Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and The Little House, for which she was awarded a Caldecott Medal in 1942. She is famous for her personification of inanimate objects - underdogs that readers cannot help but find endearing.
In addition to her work as a children’s book author, Virginia Lee Burton is also known for her leadership of the Folly Cove Designers, which was a group of decorative artisans who intricately carved linoleum blocks and used them to print textiles for domestic goods and paper. The guild began informally in 1938 and obtained national recognition in 1941. It disbanded in 1969, not long after Burton’s death in 1968 at the age of 59. There are examples of the Folly Cove Designers’ work on permanent display at the Cape Ann Historical Museum in Gloucester. Visit the Cape Ann Historical Museum's website for more information.
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