E. L. Konigsburg

Elaine Lobl was the daughter of Jewish immigrants who raised her and her two sisters in a small Pennsylvania mill town. Though she was her high school’s valedictorian, Lobl didn’t know about scholarships (her school lacked a guidance counselor), so she earned money for college by working as a bookkeeper in a meat plant. There she met her future husband, David Konigsburg, the plant owner’s brother. She studied chemistry at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, becoming her family’s first college graduate. While the Konigsburg children were small, Elaine took art lessons, and once the youngest was in school, she began writing. In her Newbery Medal acceptance speech, she describes her motivation to write as the desire to make a record of suburban America in the “early autumn of the twentieth century,” especially the everyday lives of children and families. Growing up, she never read stories about grouchy fathers or headachy mothers or pushy ladies, and she sought to put characters like these into her books. She also wanted to gently show kids that it’s okay not to conform. She was awarded the Newbery Medal for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and the Newbery Honor for her second book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. As of 2021, E. L. Konigsburg is the only author to ever have been awarded both a Newbery Medal and a Newbery Honor in the same year (1968). She was one of six authors to have won two Newbery Medals in their career. (The second Medal was for The View from Saturday in 1997.) She also wrote several picture books featuring her grandchildren. Konigsburg’s husband died in 2001, and she followed him in 2013.