: For Students, Faculty, and Staff
By Cathy Miranker
Photo/Patrice Gilbert Photography
On January 4, we celebrate the birthday of prolific author Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, whose many book series are adored by prereaders and preteens, teenagers and young adults — and the children of those original readers. Among her best-known works are Shiloh, about a boy trying to rescue an abused dog from its owner, and the 28 books in the Alice McKinley series that follows a motherless girl from 3rd grade through high school, with the final volume leaping ahead to Alice at 60.
Naylor received the Newbery Award for Shiloh in 1992; it was the 65th book she’d written. In 1995 the University of Minnesota Libraries honored her with the 20th Kerlan Award in recognition of her remarkable contributions to children’s literature. You can see the manuscripts of Shiloh, many Alice novels, and scores of her other books at the Kerlan, which also holds hundreds of documents that chronicle Naylor’s creative process.
Praising Naylor at the Kerlan Award ceremony, award committee member Dianne L. Monson said her “writing is distinguished by her sensitivity to children’s feelings and her ability to explore the child’s point of view in her work [and to] allow children to experience life through the eyes of many other people, some whose lives are relatively carefree and others who are challenged to deal with difficult relationships and situations.”
Naylor, in her Kerlan lecture, likened her work as a writer to being an archeologist at a dig—but rather than looking for bones, she was unearthing memories, anecdotes about her school days, her relationships with family and friends, her travels, her sorrows, and then creating stories with her finds.
“Writing is a way of passing along feelings and experiences to the next generation, not unlike the paintings on the wall of a cave depicting the struggles of those who lived long ago,” she said. “The imprint of what we did or said cannot be changed — like a fossil it is here for all time in the rock. But we can study it, learn from it, and let it be the basis for something new.”
The Alice series — with its matter-of-fact portrayal of friendship, embarrassments, bullying, popularity, crushes, puberty, dating, boyfriends, sex, faith, teen pregnancy, the death of a friend, cancer, and more — has frequently been targeted by book bans. Shiloh, too, has often been challenged, and Naylor recalled how one class of students had to copy a letter from the blackboard, telling her they would not be finishing Shiloh because it contained bad words. But two boys, as they were folding up their letters, secretly pencilled some tiny words into a crease: “But we love your writing.”
Born on Jan. 4, 1933 in Anderson, Indiana, in a house built by her father and grandfather, Naylor remembers her parents reading aloud every night — from Bible stories, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Collier’s Encyclopedia, the complete works of Mark Twain, a set of Sherlock Holmes detective stories that had been nibbled by mice — until she was in her teens. She was 16 when her first piece appeared in print, a baseball story for which her church magazine paid her $4.67. Her first children’s book, The Galloping Goat and Other Stories, was published in 1965, and from that date forward she wrote, on average, two or three books a year. From 1985–2013, she devoted six months each year to a new Alice book. She currently lives in Gaithersburg, MD.
As a writer for more than six decades, Naylor lays claim to some remarkable, sometimes quirky, statistics. She says she’s received 10,443 rejection slips. She recalls chewing a mouthful of Shredded Wheat when the telephone rang with news of her Newbery Award. The inspiration for Shiloh — in real life a female beagle named Clover — went to book signings and put her paw print in so many books that a stamp was made to spare her paws.
Naylor’s 149th book has recently been accepted for publication, and her work spans such genres as adult novels, memoirs, picture books, ghost stories, historical fiction, mysteries, advice books, fantasy, and coming-of-age stories. One of those books, The Grand Escape (1993), has an unusual dedication: Amtrak. In part that’s because it features a train journey but also because Naylor loves train travel. While she has a comfy living room chair for writing, she likens the train to a retreat where “I can just sit and write, with constantly changing scenery every time I look up.”
In 2024, she endowed a six-figure scholarship fund at Joliet Junior College, where she graduated in 1953. (She also took a degree at American University in 1963.)
“I look at my books as pots cooking on the stove. All are simmering, some longer than others. It’s the pot that boils over that gets my attention. When a particular story is the first thing on my mind in the morning and the last thing on my mind at night, I know the only way to deal with the excitement is to write that one next.”
Part of a series honoring winners of the Kerlan Award since its inception in 1975, this post was contributed by guest writer Cathy Miranker.
