1906-1988 · American children's librarian and author of The Moffats and Ginger Pye
About Eleanor Estes
Eleanor Estes (1906-1988) grew up in West Haven, Connecticut, the town she later turned into Cranbury. She trained and worked as a children's librarian, first in New Haven and then at the New York Public Library, before publishing The Moffats, her first book, in 1941. Its sequels The Middle Moffat and Rufus M. and her story The Hundred Dresses were named Newbery Honor Books, and Ginger Pye won the Newbery Medal in 1952.
The Moffats follows a year in the life of a family with little money and a great deal of fun in the small Connecticut town of Cranbury, around the time of the First World War. Mama, a widow, earns their living as a dressmaker in the rented yellow house on New Dollar Street, where she lives with her four children: Sylvie, the eldest, gentle and grown-up; Joey, the steady older brother who does the heavy chores; Jane, the imaginative middle girl through whose eyes much of the book is seen; and Rufus, five and a half and always in the middle of something.
The Hundred Dresses is a short novel in seven chapters about a girl who is teased at school and the classmate who watched and said nothing. Wanda Petronski, the daughter of a Polish immigrant, Jan Petronski, lives with her father and brother Jake in a shabby house on Boggins Heights, outside a small Connecticut town.