Charlotte's Bio 3

A many-faceted life

Many people with Charlotte's level of achievement in a single career, let alone in two, don't have much time or ability for a personal life. Not so Charlotte.

Along with her professional success, Charlotte had a sometimes stormy but passionate marriage that lasted 33 years (and slowly grew into friendship after she Maurice divorced in 1969, lasting until Maurice's death in 1991). She also raised two children. A boy, Stephen, later Zee, was born in 1945, and grew up to become an investor and high-stakes poker player, with an enduring interest in theater and literature. He divides his time between Las Vegas and New York. A girl, Ellen, later Crescent Dragonwagon, was born in 1952, and grew up to become a writer herself, as well as a chef and co-founder of the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where she lives with her husband Ned Shank, also a children's book writer and artist.

Charlotte at home, with friends and family

Charlotte continued to express her love of nature in her garden at Hastings-on-Hudson, a small town about an hour from New York City, where she has lived since the early '50's. Her house is filled with reminders of her rich and varied life: paintings and drawings from countless children's book illustrators, shelves and shelves full of books, many of which she edited, but many of which she read and re-read simply for pleasure and self-education. Of course there are plants everywhere, and friends come and go.

The once-shy Charlotte has many friends. Some were made through her writing and editing work (like Bill Morris, director of Library Promotion at HarperCollins, Susan Hirschman, editor at Greenwillow, Zena Sutherland, library sciences professor emeritus, and Colleen Salley, storyteller-librarian).

Others are or have been part of her Hastings life; she raised her children alongside several other young women who would become lifelong friends: Dorothy Fields, writer-raconteur; actress Augusta Prince; and Norma Hayes and Buena Dapolonia, both doctors' wives. In later years Charlotte has become very close to author-naturalist Jean Craighead George and Jean Schneider, widow of the director Alan Schneider and now an advocate for battered women. She and her sister Dorothy Arnof Shapiro, have also remained deeply attached to each other.

They know a lady

Charlotte is now the oldest resident on her street in Hastings, and the one who has lived there the longest. She has been part of two generations of children's lives on Elm Place. The book I Know a Lady might be written by almost any of the kids who now live on her block... if when they grow up, they become writers, and remember their own childhoods, and are able to put into words feelings and the little pieces of daily life that make up life as a whole.

But of course, they won't have to, because Charlotte already did.

The real reward

But the final reward of a life like Charlotte's is one she herself can only sometimes know. Through letters readers send her, through the often brief snippets of conversation she has had with those who love her books (parents, children, librarians, booksellers, teachers) at countless booksignings and conferences over the years, she knows her books have touched lives and changed lives. But there have been so many Charlotte Zolotow books, so many teachers reading to their classes, and parents reading to their children, and children reading to themselves, that she can only know a fraction of the ways and instances.

In developing the lineage of honesty and non-condescension towards children both in her own writing and that of the many, many writers she has edited, Charlotte has given solace and understanding to generations of children. As she wrote in the foreword to the anthology An Overpraised Season, which she edited, "The young are usually at other people's mercy, and in protecting themselves they can be merciless. Youth is not really the protected and beautiful period it is alleged to be, but we tend to forget this as we grow older. There will always be great differences in the way the young and other people experience the same event, and though the shape and form of these differences shift from one generation to the next, the differences remain emotionally the same. "

Charlotte Zolotow never forgot, remembering always what was different and what was the same. And children, former children, parents, and teachers are all the better for it.