Richard Atwater

Richard Atwater (born December 29, 1892 in Chicago , † August 21, 1948 ) was an American journalist, university lecturer and children's book author.

Life

Richard Atwater studied, lived and worked in Chicago. In 1921 he married Florence Hasseltine Carroll, with whom he had two daughters. Atwater taught Greek at university for a while and wrote for the Chicago Evening Post , the Chicago Daily News , the Chicago Tribune and the Herald-Examiner, as well as for the magazine The Chicagoan , which dealt with subjects from the arts and literature. For his columns he used the pseudonym "Riq".

His book Rickety Rhymes of Riq was published in 1925, and Doris and the Trolls came out in 1931 . He also wrote a children's opera called The King's Sneezes . Another book was titled The Secret History of Procopius .

In 1932 Atwater saw a documentary about Richard E. Byrd's Antarctic expedition , which inspired him to write a text that would later become the children's book Mr. Popper's Penguins . The manuscript entitled Ork! was rejected by two publishers. After Richard Atwater suffered a stroke in 1934 , he could no longer write himself and the book, which was also published in German under the title Mr. Poppers Pinguine , was rewritten and finished by his wife Florence. She made the story a group of penguins more realistic than her husband had done. The book was illustrated by Robert Lawson . It was published in 1938, remained a bestseller in children's literature for decades and received numerous awards, including the Newbery Honor.

Web links

• Mr. Popper's Penguins

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Short biography on Goodreads.com
2. ↑ biography on amazon.com
3. ↑ Anita Silvey (ed.), Children's Books and their Creators , Houghton Mifflin Juvenile Books 1995, ISBN 978-0395653807, pp. 35 f.