Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry was born in Hawaii, the second of three children. Her father was an army dentist whose work led him to move his family around the country. In 1939, for instance, the family moved to Brooklyn, New York, and in 1942, when her father was deployed to the Pacific for World War II, the family moved to Pennsylvania. As a girl, Lowry spent two years in Japan, where she attended junior high school. She attended high school in New York, and at the age of 19, she married a military officer, Donald Lowry. During their early years together, the Lowries lived in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Florida. It was only in the 1960s, when Donald settled into a career as a lawyer, that they settled in Maine. Here, Lowry raised four children while also completing a degree in English. At the age of 40, Lowry published her first book, A Summer to Die, a children’s story inspired by Lowry’s experience dealing with her older sister’s death from cancer. The novel was a commercial success. It was also in this year that Lowry divorced her husband. Lowry continued to care for her children and write a large number of children’s books throughout the 1980s and 90s. These included Number the Stars (1989) and The Giver (1993), both of which won her the Newbery Medal, the highest honor for children’s literature. She followed The Giver, a dystopian fable, with three loosely connected sequels: Gathering Blue (2000), Messenger (2004), and Son (2012). It’s been noted that Lowry’s books for children address unusually adult subject matter. Gathering Blue, for instance, includes infanticide, murder, kidnapping, and cannibalism. Lowry continues give large numbers of lectures and interviews.