1891-1967 · American novelist and historian, author of Johnny Tremain
About Esther Forbes
Esther Forbes (1891-1967) was an American novelist and historian, born in Westborough, Massachusetts, who lived most of her life in Worcester. Her biography Paul Revere and the World He Lived In (1942) won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1943, and the research for it gave her the Boston of craftsmen, apprentices and Whig clubs that she turned into Johnny Tremain, her first book for young readers, which won the Newbery Medal in 1944. In 1960 she became the first woman elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society.
Johnny Tremain follows a Boston apprentice from the summer of 1773 to the first day of the American Revolution in April 1775. Johnny, fourteen, is the most gifted of the three apprentices in the silversmith shop of old Ephraim Lapham, a pious man who warns him about pride by having him read Leviticus 26:19; the next two chapters take their titles from that verse.