Rachel Field

Rachel Lyman Field (September 19, 1894 – March 15, 1942) was an American novelist, poet, and children's fiction writer. She is best known for her work Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. Field also won a National Book Award, a Newbery Honor award and two of her books are on the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list.

Life Field was a descendant of David Dudley Field, the early New England clergyman and writer. She grew up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Her first published work was an essay entitled "A Winter Walk" printed in St. Nicholas Magazine when she was 16. She was educated at Radcliffe College where she studied writing under George Pierce Baker.

Field married Arthur S. Pederson in 1935, with whom she collaborated in 1937 on To See Ourselves. In 1938, one of her plays was adapted for the British film The Londonderry Air. She was also successful as an author of adult fiction, writing the bestsellers Time Out of Mind (1935), All This and Heaven Too (1938), and And Now Tomorrow (1942). Field also wrote the English lyrics for the version of Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria" used in the Disney film Fantasia (1940).

She moved to Hollywood, where she lived with her husband and daughter.

Rachel Field died at the Good Samaritan Hospital on March 15, 1942, of pneumonia following an operation.

Awards

Hitty, Her First Hundred Years received the Newbery Award in 1930, for the year's "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children." As a publicity stunt, Field was informed of her win via radio by a group of librarians and ALA President Milton J. Ferguson who were flying in a second plane as Field flew from New Mexico to Los Angeles.

The 1944 (posthumous) Prayer for a Child, with a story by Field and illustrations by Elizabeth Orton Jones, won the Caldecott Medal recognizing the year's "most distinguished picture book for children" published in the U.S.

Hitty and Prayer for a Child were both named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list of books deemed to belong "on the same bookshelf" with Carroll's Alice. Prayer for a Child was one of the seventeen inaugural selections in 1958, which were originally published 1893 to 1957. Hitty was added in 1961.

Time Out of Mind won one of the inaugural National Book Awards as the Most Distinguished Novel of 1935, voted by the American Booksellers Association.

Adaptation of works into other media The novel And Now Tomorrow (1942) was adapted into the 1944 film And Now Tomorrow by Irving Pichel.

Prayer for a Child (1944) was the lyrics for the song A Child's Prayer (1955), which was written for a three-part chorus of women's voices with piano accompaniment. The music was by Gustav Klemm and the arrangement was by Rudolph Schirmer. As mentioned in this article, Field had written the lyrics for one of the songs in the 1940 film Fantasia.

Selected works

1924, The Pointed People, poetry 1924, Cinderella Married, A Comedy in One Act, drama 1924, Six Plays, drama 1926, Taxis and Toadstools, poetry 1926, Eliza and the Elves, fiction 1926, An Alphabet for Boys and Girls, poetry 1927, The Magic Pawnshop, fiction 1927, The Cross-Stitch Heart And Other One-Act Plays, drama 1928, Little Dog Toby, fiction 1929, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, fiction—winner of the 1930 Newbery Medal ) 1934, Susanna B And William C, fiction 1934, God's Pocket, historical non-fiction 1935, Time Out Of Mind , fiction 1936, Fear Is the Thorn, poetry 1936, First Class Matter: A Comedy in One Act, drama 1937, To See Ourselves, by Field and her husband Arthur Pederson, fiction 1938, All This and Heaven Too, based on the true story of Field's great-aunt, Henriette Deluzy-Desportes, and made into a movie, All This, and Heaven Too, in 1940. 1938(?), The Londonderry Air, drama; produced as a film, The Londonderry Air (1938) 1940(?), "Ave Maria" lyrics for the film Fantasia (1940) 1940, All Through the Night, nativity story 1942, And Now Tomorrow, fiction 1944, Prayer for a Child, fiction, picture book illustrated by Elizabeth Orton Jones—winner of the 1945 Caldecott Medal