Lois Lenski is often remembered primarily as an illustrator. An introduction to her work may come through the amusing picture book series for young children, “Mr. Small,” or the illustrations she made for the “Betsy-Tacy” series. Her work is deceptively simple, done in a pared-down but personality-infused style.
Lenski is also perhaps best remembered as a writer for her 1945 Newbury Winner “Strawberry Girl” and her Newbury Honor book “Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison,” published in 1941.
Lenski initially aspired to a career in the fine arts. According to some sources, her domestic duties raising her husband’s children from his first marriage and her son contributed to her decision to illustrate and write her own books. Like many other artists, she kept a steady stream of work throughout the years of raising children.
Beyond these well known works, Lenski has a whole series of what she called her “Regionals.” “Strawberry Girl,” because of the Newbury, is somewhat widely available and remembered, but it is only one a series of chapter books examining the people and customs of different regions of the United States in the 1940s.
According to the Lois Lenski Covey Foundation, the inspiration for the series came in 1941 when ill health required her to leave her home in Connecticut for time in a more mild climate. She spent the winter in Louisiana. Her biography states, “On Saturdays she traveled to the town of Lafitte in order to sketch and paint. There children would gather to see what she was doing. These interactions became an opportunity to learn of how the children lived, and to gather their stories. The result was Bayou Suzette (1943), in which the stories she gathered from children and their parents were woven into a fictionalized narrative and sequence.”
Using the pattern of staying in an area and talking to the people there, Lenski went on to write 13 regional stories for young adults. While these baker’s dozen make up only a small portion of the 98 books she wrote over the course of her long life, they are a unique study of fictionalized life in different parts of the world that fascinates.
The stories include details about food and language, daily habits and community rituals. Lenski took human interest stories and fleshed them out to include a place and way of life that has likely disappeared not to return.
Explaining why she devoted herself to creating the Regionals, she said:
“My own experience in getting stories from people who have lived them has been so rich that I have felt a strong desire to pass them on to others. It is my hope that young people, reading my regional books, will share the life of these people as I shared it, and living it vicariously, through the means of a vivid, dramatic, authentic, real-life story, will learn something of tolerance toward people different from themselves.”
It seems contemporary offerings aimed at young adults skew heavily toward romance and dystopian fiction. Both do not deal with reality. In contrast, Lenski’s books, while not the most riveting entertainment on the market, offer substantive portraits of realistic people living in the world as it really was 80 years ago.
It is fortunate that her Regionals are no longer out of print and are offered to a new generation of readers. In addition to old library copies lingering, Open Road Integrated Media has republished the series. We can celebrate another well-deserved republication, making widely available good stories.
