AUTHOR OF ‘SARAH, PLAIN AND TALL,’ AND OVER 60 KIDS BOOKS

PATRICIA MACLACHLAN •1938-2022

Patricia Maclachlan, an award-winning writer known to millions of young readers as the author of “Sarah, Plain and Tall,” a novel about two motherless farm children and the gentle woman who comes to the prairie to make them whole, died March 31 at her home in Williamsburg, Mass. She was 84.

Her son John Maclachlan confirmed her death but did not cite a cause.

Maclachlan wrote more than 60 children's books during her half-century career, which she began in her mid-30s after her own children started school, leaving her time in the day to collect her memories and observations and turn them into stories.

She deplored children's books of the moralizing kind, those sledgehammers of literature wielded by grown-ups determined to pound ideas into young minds.

“Among some writers there's this ghastly notion that one has to teach children lessons,” she once told the Orange County Register. “That's condescending and incorrect. It's not what writing is about. You write to find out what you're thinking about, to find out how you feel.”

Maclachlan's thoughts often ran toward family and place, the two elements at the core of her most famous book, “Sarah, Plain and Tall.” The volume received the Newbery Medal, the highest award in children's literature, and has sold more than 7 million copies since it first appeared in 1985, according to the publishing house Harpercollins.

Set at the turn of the 20th century, the book tells the story of a farmer who lost the mother of his two children in childbirth years ago and places a newspaper advertisement for a new wife. The children, Anna and Caleb Witting, correspond by letter with their would-be new mother, Sarah Wheaton, who leaves her home on the rugged coast of Maine to join them on the windswept prairie and braid Anna's hair, bake bread and sing.

“I will come by train,” Sarah writes. “I will wear a yellow bonnet. I am plain and tall.”

The canon of children's literature has long reserved a prominent place for the prairie, which was most famously evoked by Laura Ingalls Wilder in her celebrated series about the "little house" that was home to her pioneer family. Maclachlan, who spent the early years of her childhood on the prairie of Wyoming, was credited with making a proud installment in that tradition.

“Sarah, Plain and Tall” received the Newbery Medal in 1986.

Maclachlan said the book was inspired by a story her mother had told her about a “wonderful woman who came into the family” as a mail-order bride.

“Can you imagine how very brave and courageous she must have been?” the author remarked to an interviewer.

“Sarah, Plain and Tall” was adapted into a widely viewed 1991 Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie starring Glenn Close as Sarah and Christopher Walken as Jacob Witting, the father of Anna and Caleb. Maclachlan co-wrote the script.

She wrote several sequels to the book, including "Skylark" (1994), "Caleb's Story" (2001), "More Perfect Than the Moon" (2004) and "Grandfather's Dance" (2006). Walken and Close reprised their roles in a Hallmark Hall of Fame version of "Skylark."

Several other novels by Maclachlan were adapted for TV, among them “Journey” (1991) and “Baby” (1993).