Glen Rounds

Glen Harold Rounds (April 4, 1906 During his youth, he worked at many odd jobs, including baker, cook, sign painter, sawmill worker, cowboy, mule skinner, logger, ranch hand,

Training as an artist Rounds took an interest in art from a young age, making frequent sketches of characters and scenes from his daily life. He pursued formal training in painting and drawing During this formative period, he spent a summer touring the Western United States together with Jackson Pollock, a fellow art student, and Thomas Hart Benton, their teacher at the Art Students League. Rounds and Pollock both served as models for Benton's painting The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, 1933–1934.

Rounds spent much of the early 1930s visiting publishers in New York City in an attempt to convince editors to give him work as an illustrator. Vernon Ives, who worked at Holiday House, the publisher that would eventually publish Rounds' first book, later remarked that his initial impression of Rounds was of "a young, footloose westerner with a discerning eye, a quick, sketchy style of drawing that had enormous vitality, and a tongue even more facile than his brush." After the success of Ol' Paul, the Mighty Logger, Rounds had a steady stream of work, both as a writer and illustrator of his own books and as an illustrator for the work of others, for the rest of his life.

Rounds published a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction, all of it written for an audience of children and young adults. In The Blind Colt (1941), he introduced the character of Whitey, a young Montana cowboy, who would eventually appear in eleven books published from 1941 to 1963. His first book, Ol' Paul, the Mighty Logger, was in the inaugural class of Lewis Carroll Shelf Award winners in 1958, and other titles by Rounds received the award again in 1960, 1969, 1973, 1976, and 1978. Rounds received the Kerlan Award for children's literature in 1980, and the North Carolina Award for literature in 1981. He was also the recipient of the Parents' Choice Award and The New York Times Outstanding Book Award.

Personal life Rounds served in the United States Army from 1941 to 1945 in the coast artillery and infantry, attaining the rank of staff sergeant.

Rounds married three times. He married his first wife, Mary Lucas, in December 1927; they divorced in 1937. He married his second wife, Margaret Olmsted, in January 1938; they remained married until her death in December 1968. He married his third wife, Elizabeth High, in 1989; she died in June 2002.

Rounds died on September 27, 2002, in Pinehurst, North Carolina, at the age of 96. He was survived by one son, William, and two granddaughters.

Selected bibliography

Award-winning and nominated fiction Ol' Paul, the Mighty Logger, Holiday House (1936) The Blind Colt, Holiday House (1941)

The Day the Circus Came to Lone Tree (1973) Mr. Yowder and the Lion Roar Capsules (1976) Mr. Yowder and the Giant Bull Snake, Holiday House (1978) Wild Appaloosa, Holiday House (1983) The Morning the Sun Refused to Rise: An Original Paul Bunyan Tale (1984) Washday on Noah's Ark: A Story of Noah's Ark, Holiday House (1985)

Award-winning and nominated non-fiction Beaver Business: An Almanac (1960)

The Snake Tree (1966)