A New Exhibit Featuring Lois Lenski

The Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives is pleased to host a new exhibit on Lois Lenski.  "Lois Lenski: Art, Illustration, Literature, Research" is an exhibit designed around four themes utilizing materials from the Lois Lenski Papers and collections housed in SCUA. The exhibit attempts to show some aspects of Lois Lenski's work that are familiar to many readers of her children's books, but also highlight other aspects of her work that are not so well known. Lois Lenksi was a very talented (and prolific!) children's author but she was also much more than that. She was a well-published illustrator of many types of books for other authors.  She was an accomplished artist, producing quality work in pencil, watercolor, oils, and engraving. She also did very intensive research for both her historical and regional children's books. This exhibit hopes to expand the knowledge of Lenski's accomplishments and provide context to her life's work. The exhibit, located in the Hodges Reading Room, will be up through May 31, 2014.
                                                                                                                                                                          

Lois Lenski: Voices of Children

February 7 - March 18, 2011
Hodges Reading Room

Lois Lenski (1893-1974) was one of the most popular and most gifted among children's authors and illustrators of the twentieth century. This small exhibit is an attempt to document her talent and to show, in her own words, her intense feelings for the proper literature and education for children.

Born and reared in Ohio, Lenski gravitated early to a career in art. Although she majored in education at Ohio State University and prepared for a career in teaching, she took many art courses in college, decided on art as a vocation, and pursued this career at the Art Students' League in New York, furthering her art studies in England and Italy. At the Art Students' League,she became an assistant to the muralist Arthur Covey and married him in 1921. Advancing from part-time jobs designing greeting cards and drawings for advertisements, Lenski spent the decade of the 1920s illustrating the works of others, primarily for children's books. In addition to illustrating works such as Padraic Colum's The Peep-Show Man and Kenneth Graham's The Golden Age and Dream Days (which allowed her to exercise her passion for medieval costume and culture), she developed an association with the New York publishing firm Platt and Munk, illustrating such well-known works as Cinderella and The Little Engine That Could.

At the suggestion of an editor, Lenski decided to try her own hand at writing for children, publishing in 1927 Skipping Village, based on her own childhood experiences in Anna, Ohio. In her long and illustrious career as both writer and illustrator, Lenski authored more than eighty books for children of various ages, including the immensely popular "Davy" and "Mr.Small" series for younger readers and the influential and provocative "Roundabout America" and "Regional America" books for older children, as well as historical novels and poetry. In addition to providing riveting entertainment, her books invariably made a plea for tolerance and understanding among all people. Among her many awards were the Newbery Medal for 1946 for Strawberry Girl, one of her fifteen regional novels for young readers, and the National Child Study Association Award in 1948.

Special Collections & University Archives, Jackson Library, has many signed first editions, translations, manuscripts, original art work, artifacts, and ephemera in its Lois Lenski Collection, as well as a collection of miniature and early children's books collected by Lenski.

For her many contributions to children's literature, Lois Lenski in 1962 was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

-Dr. William K. Finley