Her second book, Crown Fire (1951), is a logging story set in Oregon’s forests. Her first book, a story about a circus called Sawdust in His Shoes (1950), received critical acclaim from the Junior Literary Guild, the New York Times, and The Horn Book. She published short stories in Cricket, Jack and Jill, Parents’ Magazine, and The Writer. They lived in Cleveland, Oklahoma City, and San Diego while he pursued his newspaper career.Īfter a twelve-year absence from writing, Eloise McGraw returned to her first love. She married William Corbin McGraw, a newspaper man and later a children’s book author, in 1940.

She also dabbled in modern dance, puppetry, and radio and children’s theater for the Junior League and the YWCA. She continued studying drawing and sculpture at Oklahoma and Colorado universities-and later at the Museum Art School in Portland-and earned money from portrait and mural commissions and from teaching oil painting at Oklahoma City University. Jarvis attended Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, and earned a bachelor’s degree in art in 1937, receiving the art award on graduation. Then she took a class in oil painting and as a result dropped writing almost entirely for more than a decade. Not surprisingly, Eloise began to write stories herself at an early age and ended up with her high school’s literary award at graduation. During those trips, her father, a born storyteller, wrote stories for her instead of letters. She grew up in Oklahoma City, but she and her mother spent many summers with relatives in Oregon. Among her literary awards are three Newbery Honor Books, won in three different decades an Edgar Award a Golden Kite award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Literary Arts.Įloise Jarvis Hamilton was born in Houston, Texas, on December 9, 1915, to Loy Hamilton and Genevieve Scoffern. When Literary Arts gives the Eloise Jarvis McGraw award to the best Oregon writer of young adult books each year, it is an acknowledgment of the state’s most decorated author in that genre, Eloise McGraw.

The Moorchild by Eloise Jarvis McGraw