Jim Murphy, children’s author who humanized U.S. history, dies at 74

Jim Murphy, a prizewinning children’s author who immersed young readers in American history, using extensive research and firsthand accounts to humanize sprawling, chaotic events like the Battle of Gettysburg, the Great Chicago Fire and an outbreak of yellow fever that became the country’s first epidemic, died May 1 at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 74.

His wife, Alison Blank, confirmed the death but said the cause was not yet known.

Mr. Murphy, a former children’s book editor, wrote more than 30 books that chronicled fascinating but often bleak chapters in U.S. history. His work frequently spotlighted the lives of young people and returned to themes of determination, perseverance and compassion while telling engrossing stories of snowstorms, deadly germs and bravery on the battlefield.

Awarding Mr. Murphy the 2010 Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime contributions to youngadult literature, prize committee chair Maren C. Ostergard

said, “Jim Murphy’s excellence in writing gripping nonfiction allows readers to realize that young people do not stand by but actively participate in history.”

“Who can resist a giant fire or an unstoppable disease?” Mr. Murphy said in a Q&A on his website. “I want my nonfiction to be as exciting and readable as any novel, so I’m always searching for topics that are inherently dramatic.”

Drawing on eyewitness accounts from letters, journal entries, oral histories and archival photographs, he wrote about the horrors of combat in books including “The Boys’ War” (1990), which examined the Civil War experience of soldiers as young as 12, and “Truce” (2009), about Christmastime cease-fires during World War I.

But he also ranged far beyond the battlefield, including in “The Great Fire” (1995), which told the story of the 1871 inferno that destroyed most of Chicago, and “An American Plague” (2003), a chronicle of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic that prompted President George Washington and his Cabinet to flee Philadelphia, the nation’s interim capital. Both books received Newbery Honors, and “An American Plague” was a finalist for the National Book Award for young people’s literature.

In a Washington Post review of “The Great Fire,” journalist Michael Kernan said Mr. Murphy had written a book that was “original, personal and real,” without talking down to young readers or relying on hackneyed literary tropes. “The intensity of his interest sweeps the reader along just the way the fire itself spread from Mrs. O’Leary’s barn,” he added, noting that while “the book is by no means morbid, there is no shrinking from the hard facts of death and panic, from the obstinacy and incompetence that sent fire wagons to the wrong places time and again.”

Mr. Murphy said that if his books succeeded in transporting readers into the past, it was largely because of the months or years he spent conducting research online or in archives, looking for small details and trying to capture the stories of real people like Julia Lemos, a widowed artist who saved her five children and elderly parents from the Chicago fire, and Claire Innes, a 12-year-old who was separated from her family during the chaos.

“Jim was an inspired and dedicated researcher,” his longtime editor, Dinah Stevenson, said in an email. “He had a rare talent for finding - in letters, diaries and other documents the voices that would bring his narratives to life, as if he had personally interviewed people from the past.”

James John Patrick Murphy was born into an IrishItalian family in Newark on Sept. 25, 1947, and grew up in nearby Kearny, N.J. His father was an accountant, and his mother was a bookkeeper and artist. She became one of his fiercest champions, encouraging his interest in publishing even as Mr. Murphy doubted whether he was smart enough to write a book.

“Out of the blue,” he said, she invited Macmillan executive and “Gone With the Wind” editor Harold Latham over for dinner so that Mr. Murphy could talk with him about working in publishing. Latham said “to keep writing and to imitate other people less and less,” Mr. Murphy recalled, “and it took me from 18 to 30 to figure that out.”