Louise Fitzhugh

This article or section needs to be revised. Details should be given on the talk page. Please help to improve it , and then remove this flag.

Louise Fitzhugh (born October 5, 1928 in Memphis , Tennessee , † November 19, 1974 ) was an American children's and youth author and illustrator . Fitzhugh died on November 19, 1974 of complications from a stroke.

Life

Childhood and youth

Louise Fitzhugh was born into a prominent affluent Memphis family in 1928. Her father, Millsaps Fitzhugh, a descendant of a Civil War hero, had married a young woman from a simple family named Louise Perkins in Mississippi. When their daughter Louise was a few months old, they divorced. Until her father's wedding to Sally Taylor in 1933, Louise lived with him in their grandparents' house, together with their grandmother. Until she was 16, Louise Fitzhugh led the adjusted life of a daughter from a good family. In her final high school years, Louise Fitzhugh befriended Ed Thompson, who later became a Memphis lawyer. Both broke out one night to make a quick marriage in Mississippi, which was quickly canceled by their parents.

Professional background

After graduating in 1946, Louise Fitzhugh first attended Southwestern College in Memphis, but soon moved to another in Florida. In 1948 she moved to the southern states and switched to New York's Bard's College, which her uncle Peter Taylor had recommended to her because of the writing courses. She moved to New York with Joan Williams. As a major, she first studied contemporary literature, but then switched to child psychology . In 1949, Louise Fitzhugh's grandmother died and she inherited money. The financial cushion made her independent and left college six months before graduation. She moved to Greenwich Village and studied alternately at the "Art Students League" and the "Cooper Union", later in France and Italy.

In the 1950s she had relationships with both sexes. Louise Fitzhugh's friends were literary agents, casting directors, artists, academics, advertising professionals, scientists - often the first to break into male domains in their field. Her friends included Lorraine Hansberry , Jane Wagner , Marijane Meaker (ME Kerr) and the mystery writer Sandra Scoppettone . She had a lifelong friendship with Scoppettone.

Career

In the early 1960s, Louise Fitzhugh expressed her fears in colorful blotch images similar to the Rorschach tests , she painted her dreams, made dark woodcuts of children. She painted people around her and wrote notes. In 1960 she and Scoppettone developed a picture book for adults that branded their own bohemian artist. The book that Scoppetone had written and illustrated by Fitzhugh was published in 1961 under the title "Suzuki Beane" . It was successful, first in adults and later in children. In 1961 Fitzhugh moved with Alice Glas into a garden apartment on East 85th Street, the neighborhood of which is believed to be the background for "Harriet, the spy". During this time, Fitzhugh worked on her psychoanalysis and began literary projects that thematized her childhood in the southern states . She started a novel "Crazybaby", and in 1962 she finished an autobiographical play entitled "Mother Sweet, Father Sweet". When it was due to be performed, she declined to produce because of the producer's request for revision. She also began with the novel "Amelia", in which two young girls fall in love. He recalls Louise Fitzhugh's first love, who later died in an airplane accident. The literary agent she showed the novel to refused because of the lesbian content. The manuscript has since been lost. In 1963, Louise Fitzhugh began designing Harriet, the Spy. Unusual for the time, she was paid an advance on the book when the editor Ursula Nordstrom read the first pages of the manuscript .

In "Harriet" Fitzhugh expressed all the pain and loneliness, curiosity and excitement of her own childhood. Louise Fitzhugh said of the autobiographical features in "Harriet": "Like Harriet, I had a nanny that I was completely crazy about. Then the nanny went away and I never heard from her again." The book has sold four million copies since its publication in 1964. It was voted Best Children's Book by the New York Times in 1964. In the late 1960s, girls formed detective clubs, hid under desks in staff rooms, and took notes there. Harriet's role model animated young women to write.

Following "Harriet, The Spy", Fitzhugh wrote a follow-up story "The Long Secret" (German: News from Harriet's spy notebook). 1965, the year The Long Secret was published, marked a turning point for Fitzhugh. She became successful and her father died. Fitzhugh was now very cash and free from parental rules. Taking advantage of her new wealth, she bought a summer home on Long Island and changed her wardrobe, ditching women's clothes and getting bespoke suits. Now she looked more like a young man. She moved in the Bridgehampton gay scene and lived with drug and alcohol use. She wrote another children's book "Sport" (German: Pele, the Second), which did not come close to the intensity of "Harriet". In 1969, Fitzhugh and Scoppetone published "Bang, Bang, You're Dead," an anti-war picture book. Some critics have described it as cumbersome and oversubscribed. Her last work was "Nobody's Family Is Going To Change" published in 1974, in which she describes the story of two Afro-American siblings, Emma and Willie.

Works (selection)

Published in German

• Harriet, espionage all kinds (orig. Harriet the Spy , 1964), Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1968; Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt 2009, ISBN 3596853680
  • Harriet, the little detective (orig. Harriet the Spy , 1964), Omnibus, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-570-20361-1
• News from Harriet's espionage booklet (Orig. The Long Secret , 1965), Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1972; Omnibus, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-570-20039-6
• Pele the Second (Orig. Sport , 1982), Bertelsmann, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-570-00335-3

Adaptation

Harriet the Spy was filmed twice as Harriet the Little Detective (1996) and Harriet: Spionage All Kinds (2010).

Web links

• Literature by and about Louise Fitzhugh in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and reviews of works by Louise Fitzhugh at perlentaucher.de
• Louise Fitzhugh in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from November 21, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-05-07/news/a-greenwich-village-of-the-mind/
3. ↑ http://www.imdb.de/title/tt1545097/