Jean Lee Latham

Jean Lee Latham was born in 1902 in Buckhannon, West Virginia, the daughter of a cabinetmaker and a teacher. She studied at West Virginia Wesleyan College, where she wrote plays, graduated in 1925, and later attended the Ithaca Conservatory and earned a master's degree from Cornell University in 1930. She taught English, history and play production in Ithaca, New York, and wrote plays for radio and the stage. During the Second World War she trained inspectors for the United States Signal Corps. After the war she turned to writing for young readers, beginning with The Story of Eli Whitney. Her best-known book, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch (1955), is a fictionalized life of Nathaniel Bowditch, an eighteenth-century boy from Salem, Massachusetts, who was bound as an apprentice but taught himself mathematics and navigation and wrote a famous guide for sailors; it won the Newbery Medal in 1956. She went on to write many more biographies for children, of figures such as Samuel Morse, Sam Houston and Rachel Carson. She died in 1995.

Jean Lee Latham is also an author in the library: author page and works.

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