Virginia Lee Burton

Virginia Lee Burton (August 30, 1909 – October 15, 1968), also known by her married name Virginia Demetrios, was an American illustrator and children's book author. She wrote and illustrated seven children's books, including Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and The Little House (1943), which won the Caldecott Medal. She also illustrated six books by other authors.

Burton founded the textile collective Folly Cove Designers in Cape Ann, Massachusetts, which had numerous museum exhibitions. Some of its members' works are held today in the collections of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the Cape Ann Museum, and New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yates later published children's books under the name Lena Dalkeith. Later, she went by the name Jeanne D'Orge.

Burton had an older sister, Christine, and younger brother, Alexander Ross Burton, in addition to their father's first two sons, Harold Hitz Burton and Felix Arnold Burton. Harold became an attorney, politician and Supreme Court Justice; and Arnold an architect.

Return to East Coast In 1928, after a year at art school, Burton moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father was living. It was also closer to her sister, by then a dancer in New York City, who invited Virginia to join her. Their father broke his leg, and Burton stayed in Boston to help him. She found work as a "sketcher" for the Boston Evening Transcript (now defunct). For two-and-a-half years, she worked under its drama and music critic. Portraying actors and other performers, she signed her drawings as "VleeB". For a year, the couple lived in Lincoln, where their first son Aristides (called Ari) was born. They moved to the Folly Cove neighborhood of Gloucester. Their second son Michael was born in nearby Groton on Burton's birthday in 1935.

Burton said her first published book, Choo Choo (1935), about an anthropomorphic train engine, reflected strategy she learned from reactions to her first book, which was not published:

quote|My first book, Jonnifer Lint, was about a piece of dust. I and my friends thought it was very clever but thirteen publishers disagreed with us and when I finally got the manuscript back and read it to Aris, age three and a half he went to sleep before I could even finish it. That taught me a lesson and from then on I worked with and for my audience, my own children. I would tell them the story over and over, watching their reaction and adjusting to their interest or lack of interest ... the same with the drawings. Children are very frank critics.

Burton died on October 15, 1968, of lung cancer.

Sons Aristides Burton Demetrios was a sculptor of figurative and abstract works, ranging from large public commissions to private pieces for gardens. Aristides died December 12, 2021, in Santa Barbara, California, at the age of 89.

Michael Burton Demetrios was a businessman, leading Marine World Africa in its numerous locations in the United States. Since 1998 he had been president of Intra-Asia, a US company with two amusement parks in China and plans for five additional. Michael died August 5, 2016, in Orlando, Florida.

Awards and legacy 1943 Caldecott Medal: The Little House Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place (2007), is a documentary film directed by Christine Lundberg and narrated by Lindsay Crouse. It premiered at the Cape Ann Museum on December 8, 2007, and first aired on the Boston PBS station WGBH-TV on December 30, 2007. The Little House (1942); —Caldecott Medal winner Burton said the house of the title "was based on our own little house which we moved from the street into 'a field of daises with apple trees growing around.'" Robert J. Bradshaw, Suite No. 3, "Katy and the Big Snow", was commissioned in 2009 by the Cape Ann Symphony, which premiered it that year. An animated adaptation of Choo Choo: The Story of a Little Engine Who Ran Away was seen in Shelley Duvall's Bedtime Stories and was narrated by country singer Bonnie Raitt.