Esther Forbes

Forbes was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, though she spent a lot of time in her youth in Worcester, Massachusetts and in Madison, Wisconsin. She attended Bradford Academy, a junior college, as well as took classes at the University of Wisconsin. While living in Wisconsin, Forbes joined the editorial board for the Wisconsin Literary Magazine. Upon returning to Worcester, she began working for Houghton Mifflin Company and wrote articles for the Boston Evening Transcript. From 1926 to 1933, Forbes was married to an attorney, Albert L. Hoskins. Though she kept her married name after the divorce, she published under her maiden name. Forbes published her first novel, O Genteel Lady!, in 1926, and she wrote several other novels throughout her career. Following her divorce, she returned to Worcester to live with her mother and siblings, and her mother helped her research her novels (all of which were historical fiction, many set in the colonial era or right after the Revolutionary War) at the American Antiquarian Society. She’s best known for Johnny Tremain, which she began writing the day after Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. The novel won the Newbery Award, and her biography of Paul Revere earned her the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for History. After Forbes’s death of rheumatic heart disease, the royalties for her novels, as well as her research for a novel about witchcraft, were donated to the American Antiquarian Society. She was the first elected female member of the society.