The author who wrote about lost children
The children in Betsy Byars’ novels met hardship with self-reliance. Of the more than 65 books she wrote, many featured characters with decidedly non-fairytale lives. In Summer of the Swans (1970)—winner of the Newbery Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in children’s literature—an awkward, orphaned 14-year-old searches for her intellectually disabled brother after he gets lost in the woods. The Pinballs (1976) focused on three children placed in the same foster home;
The Night Swimmers, winner of a 1981 National Book Award, is about a girl who cares for her brothers after their mother dies and their father abandons them to become a country singer.
“Byars has a gift for exposing the soul of the lost child—the damaged, the alienated, the unloved,” wrote one reviewer in The New York Times, though Byars had a more matter-of-fact description of her work. “I take some kids,” she said, “and throw them into a crisis and solve the crisis.” Byars grew up in Charlotte, N.C., where her “father was a textile executive and her mother was a homemaker,” said The Washington Post. While a book lover from early on, she had no
Betsy Byars
aspirations to be an author. “Their photographs looked funny,” she wrote in a memoir, “as if they’d been taken to a taxidermist and stuffed.” Instead, Byars sought a math degree in college but switched to English after flunking calculus. She married “three weeks after her college graduation,” said Publisher’s Weekly, and soon had the first of four children. It was a move to Illinois, where her husband pursued a graduate degree in engineering, that led Byars to start writing, said The New York Times. Bored and lonely, she began contributing articles to magazines and then decided to try her hand at children’s books, figuring the ones her daughters read looked easy. “She endured many rejections before her first book, Clementine”— about a very demanding stuffed dragon—“was published in 1962.” The Newberywinning Summer of the Swans brought her a new level of attention; she had to install a larger mailbox to accommodate a flood of inquiries from young readers. Byars likened the creative process to trying to “spin straw into gold.” If a children’s author gets “very lucky,” she said, “the straw actually will be turned into gold, for a fleeting moment by the miraculous mind of a child.”