Beatrix Potter, 1866-1943

Potter in 1913. Photo credit - Wikipedia

A best-selling English children's author, illustrator, and conservationist.

Helen Beatrix Potter was born in London, England, into a wealthy family. She was homeschooled, spent lots of her time outdoors, looked after her pets, such as rabbits, cats, and mice, and collected butterflies, which she studied and drew. From a young age, she was drawn to fairy tales and fantasy, incorporating her two loves by illustrating stories featuring her own pets.

As Potter got older, especially during her family’s annual vacation in Scotland and the Lake District, she became interested in natural science, collecting fossils, exploring insects, and painting them. Over time, Potter focused on mycology – the study of fungi; she drew and wrote a paper on spore germination, which she presented to the Linnean Society in 1897. Later in life, she donated her mycological drawings to the Armitt Museum and Library in Ambleside, which mycologists still use to identify fungi.

In her 20s, Potter, who wanted to become financially independent, began to sell holiday cards she designed, often featuring small animals like rabbits and mice. In 1890, a printing company bought some of her drawings of Benjamin Bunny to illustrate the rhyme book A Happy Pair. Afterward, she sold more illustrations for children’s books.

Inspired by the successes, Potter decided to publish her own illustrated stories. She took an illustrated letter she sent to the son of her former governess and formed it into a book titled The Tale of Peter Rabbit. After she couldn’t find any buyers, she self-published it in 1901, but the following year, it was published commercially by Frederick Warne & Company.

The story, which was about “four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter,” depicted the rural countryside by combining high-quality illustrations with simple prose. The book was printed as a small size book so that even small children could hold it. It was an immediate success, and within a year, Potter converted illustrated letters into two tale books, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tailor of Gloucester. During her lifetime, Potter wrote over 60 books, including 23 children’s tales, which sold millions of copies. The last tale book published in her lifetime was Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes in 1922.

From the get-go, Potter anticipated her characters’ commercial potential. In 1903, she patented a Peter Rabbit doll and developed various merchandise, including figurines, board games, china tea sets, and baby blankets. It made Potter and her publisher a fortune, and she had the income that allowed her the autonomy that initiated this enterprise.

In 1905, at 39, Potter bought the Hill Top Farm Near Sawrey in the Lake District. She learned Fell farming techniques, raised livestock, including chickens, cows, and pigs, and bred Herdwick sheep. A few years later, Potter bought Castle Farm across the road and resided there. Most books she wrote in this period reflect her interest and engagement with rural life, including The Tale of Ginger and Pickles and The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse.

In 1913, Potter married her solicitor William Heelis and became more involved with village life, establishing Nursing Trust for local villages and serving in numerous committees regarding rural issues.

Throughout her life, Potter was a devoted conservationist and supported the National Trust’s efforts to preserve land from being destroyed by the increasing development of the time. She conserved and restored farms, and as an authority on the traditional Lakeland crafts, she always ensured that the restored farmhouses had antique Lakeland furniture.
She died at 77 of complications from pneumonia.

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“Even the smallest one can change the world.”

“Even the smallest one can change the world.”

Fun Facts

  • She was engaged to her editor, Norman Warne, but he died before marriage.
  • The Herdwick sheep she breaded won many awards in local agriculture competitions, in which she often served as a judge.
  • In 1942, she became the first woman elected president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association. She died before taking office.
  • She left most of her property to the National Trust, including more than 4,000 acres of land, 16 farms and cottages, herds of cattle and Herdwick sheep, and nearly all of the original illustrations for her books.
  • The Victoria & Albert Museum, London, holds her childhood sketchbook and a collection of letters and drawings.
  • The Perth Museum and Art Gallery in Perth, Scotland, keeps her fungus drawings.
  • Mycologist W.P.K. Findlay included many of her fungus paintings in his Wayside & Woodland Fungi book.
  • Her Hill Top Farm is a house museum managed by the National Trust.
  • The Beatrix Potter Gallery in Hawkshead, Cumbria, England, is dedicated to preserving and presenting her original book illustrations.
  • The World of Beatrix Potter in Bowness-on-Windermere, Cumbria, is an attraction dedicated to her and the characters from her books.
  • In 2015 a manuscript of one of her unpublished books was discovered in the Victoria and Albert Museum archive. The book, The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, was published the following year to mark her 150th birthday.
  • In 2016, Peter Rabbit and other of her characters were featured in a series of UK postage stamps.
  • The asteroid 13975 Beatrixpotter is named in her honor.
  • The Beatrix Potter Society is a charity dedicated to studying and appreciating her life and work.
  • Her books were adapted into dozens of TV shows and movies, including the BBC's animation series The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends and the 2021 live action-stop motion film Roald & Beatrix: The Tail of the Curious Mouse.
  • The film Miss Potter, starring Renée Zellweger, follows her early life.

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Category: Literature & Poetry
Tags: Author and Painter

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Ada Louise Huxtable WWP
Arts

Ada Louise Huxtable, 1921-2013

An architecture critic and a writer. Received the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Born Ada Louise Landman in NYC, an only child in a middle-class Jewish family. Growing up in Manhattan, Huxtable loved strolling along the streets, fascinated by its building, such as the Grand Central Terminal, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Natural History. She studied art at Hunter College, graduating magna cum laude, and then architectural history at NYU Institute of Fine Arts. At the time, she worked in Bloomingdale’s furnishings department, where she met her soon-to-be husband, Garth Huxtable. In 1946, at 25, Huxtable landed a job as an assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. After five years, she left her job to study Italian architecture in Italy for a year. Upon her return, she began writing as a contributing editor for various art and architectural journals. At the age of 37, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, in which she examined the structural and design advances of American architecture. In 1963, 42 years old Huxtable was hired as the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a position she held for almost 20 years. In her column, she wrote about new and old buildings, threatened buildings, and bad-designed buildings. She also mentioned emerging architects, architectural trends, movements, and exhibitions. Huxtable encouraged the everyday readers to look at buildings from a new perspective, not as an assembly of bricks and pilasters but as a public statement with history and meaning. Raising awareness of the city’s heritage, the urban environment, and civic engagement, she set the tone for modern architecture criticism, for which, at the age of 49, she was the first-ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In 1981, at the age of 60, Huxtable received a MacArthur grant that allowed her in-depth research on subjects she was interested in, such as the development of the skyscraper, the negative impact of postmodernism building, and preservation vs. modernity. At 76, she returned to writing for the public as an architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal, publishing columns for the next 15 years. Throughout her career, Huxtable was involved in various committees, serving as a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Architectural Selection and Building Design Committees for the Getty Center, Getty Villa, and as a Jury member for The Pritzker Architecture Prize. She published more than 10 books on architecture, including “Kicked a Building Lately?,” “Goodbye History,” “Hello Hamburger,” and a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. Huxtable died in NYC at 91. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Agatha Christie WWP
Literature & Poetry

Agatha Christie, 1890-1976

English author and playwright. Known as the Queen of Mystery for her detective novels.

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, into a middle-class family. In her early years, she was homeschooled by her parents and taught herself to read at the age of five, against her mother’s wish. In 1901, at 10, she wrote her first poem, “The Cow Slip.” That same year, her father died, and not long after, her mother remarried, and the family moved to Cheadle, Cheshire. She began to receive formal education at Miss Guyer’s Girls’ School but had trouble adjusting to the strict environment. At 15, she was sent to a boarding school in Paris, where she mainly had piano lessons and vocal training. Following her return to England, she began writing short stories reflecting her interest in spiritualism and the paranormal. These include The Call of Wings, and The House of Beauty, later published as The House of Dreams. In addition, she began working on her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, which she tried to publish under a pseudonym but got rejected by six different publishers. In 1912, at 22, she began a relationship with a military officer named Archie Christie. At the outbreak of World War I, he was sent to fight in France, and the couple had to wait for his home leave to get married. During the war, she volunteered as a nurse at the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross. There, she met many Belgian soldiers, which inspired her to create the character of Hercule Poirot – a former Belgian police officer “with a magnificent mustache.” He appeared in Christie’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as the distinguished detective and later in 25 more novels and numerous short stories. That first novel was written in 1916 but was published only in 1920 after Christie signed a six books contract with The Bodley Head publication. After the war, Christie and her husband moved to London, and in 1919 she gave birth to her daughter Rosalind. She continued to write thrillers and murder mystery stories, developing new detective characters, such as Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary and Miss Jane Marple in the short story collection The Thirteen Problems. In 1926, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was an immediate best-seller, and years later was voted the best crime novel ever by the British Crime Writers’ Association. Despite her literary success, she dealt with personal issues. First, her mother died, and then her husband filed for divorce after falling in love with another woman. On December 3rd, 1926, following a fight with her husband, Christie left the house without saying where she was going. The next morning, her car was found abandoned, and the mysterious disappearance of the author became a news sensation. Thousand police officers and 15,000 volunteers searched for her. The author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a medium one of Christie’s gloves to locate her, and a newspaper offered a £100 reward to the person who would find her. Eleven days later, Christie got recognized in a hotel in Yorkshire, where she registered under the last name of her husband’s lover. She suffered from amnesia and couldn’t recall who she was or how she got to Yorkshire. After the incident, she moved to London with her daughter, received psychiatric treatment, and divorced. In 1928, at 38, she took the Orient Express to Istanbul and then continued to Baghdad. While visiting the archaeological site at Ur, she befriended the archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who invited her back the following year. Then, she met the archaeologist Max Mallowan, 13 years her junior. After they married, she joined him on his archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, which inspired many of her stories, such as the 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express. She continued to publish more novels and short stories, and in 1943, after she disliked a stage adaption of one of her novels, she began to adapt her stories into plays. In the early 1970s, her health began to decline. She published her last novel in 1973 and made her last public appearance in 1974. She died two years later at the age of 85. During her life, she wrote 74 novels (66 of them are detective stories), 14 short-stories collections, 19 plays, and an autobiography. Dozens of her works got adapted into films, TV series, and stage plays. Her books have been translated into over 100 languages and sold over 300 million copies worldwide. In 1976, at the time of her death, she was the best-selling novelist in history.   Dive deeper into the inspiring story of Agatha Christie with our fun and engaging printable worksheet! Available now on Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers.   This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Alice Walker WWP
Literature & Poetry

Alice Walker, 1944

A novelist, poet, and social activist. The first African-American woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers. At 8, she was injured in her eye after her brother played with a BB gun, causing her permanent blindness in one eye. The mark on her eye made her an easy target to her classmates, so she turned to poetry for comfort. Growing up in the segregated south, she attended an only black kids’ high school, from which she graduated valedictorian. Her high scores granted her a full scholarship to Spelman College, where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College in NYC. In this period, Walker had an abortion which caused her suicidal thoughts. She wrote all about it in her poems. In 1965, at the age of 21, Walker moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and became active in the civil rights movement. She worked for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and as a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program while serving as writer-in-residence in various academic institutes publishing essays and short stories. At 23, she married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights attorney. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in the south, and the couple had to travel to NYC to get married. On their return, they became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi since 1822, when the miscegenation laws passed. During their nine years of marriage, they suffered recurring harassment from the Ku Klux Klan. In 1970, at 26, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, following the life of an abusive sharecropper husband and father. Three years later, she was appointed editor of Ms. Magazine, published her second poetry collection and her first collection of short stories. In 1976, Walker returned to NYC and published her second novel Meridian, about several civil rights activists in the south during the 1960s. In the late 1970s, she moved to California, where she wrote her best-known work, The Color Purple. Published in 1982, the novel explores the struggles of a black woman in the racist and patriarchal society of 1900s Georgia. The book was a best-seller, and in the following year, 39 years old Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Later the novel was adapted into a film featuring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg and a Broadway musical produced by Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey. In 1984, she co-founded the feminist publishing company Wild Tree Press. She deepened the world of some of her characters from The Color Purple in two of her novels, The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy, and created new characters that allowed her to delve into other social issues, such as female sexuality in By the Light of My Father’s Smile from 1998, and identity questions in Now Are the Time to Open Your Heart from 2005. Throughout the decades, Walker published seven novels, ten poetry collections, four short stories collections, four children’s books, and a dozen collections of essays and articles. In all of her work, Walker deals with the struggles of black people, especially women, and their experiences in sexist, racist, and violent surroundings. Often using Black vernacular, which highlights the hundreds of years of slavery and oppression, she had dealt with complex topics such as rape, isolation, bisexuality, and troubled relationships within the black community. Walker is a long-time social and political activist, promoting and fighting for various causes, from black and women’s rights to environmental issues, Palestinians’ fight for independence, and the elimination of female genital mutilation. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Alma Thomas One of Her Paintings WWP
Arts

Alma Thomas, 1891-1978

One of the major American abstract painters of the 20th century.

Alma Woodsey Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia, to an upper-middle-class family. Her family was active in the Black community in town and often hosted art and literary salons. She showed artistic abilities from a young age, creating sculptures and puppets out of clay from the river behind her house. In 1907, racial violence increased in the South, and at 16, Thomas and her family moved to Washington, DC. She attended the segregated Armstrong Technical High School, where she had her first art class. She aspired to become an architect, and since it was an unusual profession for women at the time, she decided to study kindergarten education instead. In 1914, at 23, she began her 36 years career as a teacher. In 1921, at the age of 30, Thomas returned to school as a home economics student at Howard University. Soon after, she switched to fine art in the new art department, becoming the first student to graduate the program and probably the first Black woman in the US to earn a bachelor’s degree in art. At 33, with her new specialization, Thomas began teaching art at Shaw Junior High School, leaving for her retirement 36 years later. She also founded a community arts program for children while attending similar programs for adults. In 1930, she began taking summer courses at Columbia University, earning a Master’s in art education at 43 years old. In this period, her art was influenced by the French School of Painting, focusing on landscapes and still-life painted in an impressionist style. During the 1940s, she was part of The Little Paris Group – a community of Black Washington artists that helped beginner artists improve their techniques. It had inspired her to further her academic education, and for the next ten years, she took night and weekend classes in Art History and Painting at the American University. At the time, her art evolved from figurative painting to abstracts, experimenting with shapes and colors, and she became associated with the Washington Color School – an abstract expressionist art movement. Over the years, Thomas continued painting, but only after she retired from teaching did she become a full-time professional artist. At 69, she began to translate all the theoretical and practical education she acquired over the decades into her own art with a unique point of view. She became known for her colorful paintings of abstracted shapes and patterns, as can be seen in her series of Earth Paintings, in which she painted abstract circles that reference the rows of azaleas and cherry blossoms that grow in Washington DC. In 1966, at the age of 75, Thomas had her first retrospective exhibition at Howard University. She continued to create new work, such as the Space series, inspired by the moon landing in 1969 and displaying it in various venues, such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1972 she became the first black woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Thomas died at the age of 87 following aortic surgery. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
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