Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry was born in Hawaii in 1937. She knew she wanted to be a writer before she was four years old. “I remember feeling the excitement that I had, the first time that I realized each letter had a sound, and the sounds went together to make words; and the words became sentences, and the sentences became stories.”
Her 1954 high school yearbook picture identifies Lowry as a “future novelist.” But Lowry did not publish any of her stories until 25 years later. First “there were children to raise, education to complete, experience to learn from, and losses to mourn, ” says Lowry. She attended Brown University for two years, left it to marry and raise a family, and completed her college education in 1972.
Her first book, A Summer To Die, was published in 1979. The book fictionalizes her experiences with an older sister who died of cancer. Lowry has since written more than 20 novels, including Number the Stars (1989) and The Giver (1994). Both of these books received the prestigious Newbery Medal. Her other novels include Taking Care of Terrific; Autumn Street; The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline; Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye; and the popular Anastasia Krupnik series.
In addition, Lowry has written textbooks on African-American literature and literature of the American Revolution. She also has contributed to newspapers and magazines. Most of her writing, however, is for young people.
Lowry now divides her time between her home on Boston’s Beacon Hill, in a neighborhood with a quiet sense of history, and her 150-year-old farmhouse in New Hampshire. She enjoys sailing, movies, music, and time with her children and grandchildren.
Observations of her children and memories of her own childhood shape the young characters that Lowry creates. Her characters have many personalities; the humorous, rebellious Anastasia Krupnik is very different from the thoughtful, tortured Jonas in The Giver. But Lowry wrote about both of them for the same reason—to ease the loneliness that makes it painful to grow up. “Walking through a scary place is easier if you know that someone has walked there once, and survived.”
Lowry’s characters confront many “scary” situations. For example, in Number the Stars, Annemarie is glad to be “an ordinary person who would never be called upon for courage.” But when Hitler invades Annemarie’s native Denmark, she finds her courage tested as her family tries to save their Jewish neighbors from the Nazis.
Some people would prefer to forget the Holocaust. One woman asked Lowry why she recreated such terrible memories. Lowry responded by quoting her German daughter-in-law, who believes that the story must be told again and again. Her other Newberywinning novel, The Giver, also confronts the issue of painful memories. Lowry’s 1994 Newbery acceptance speech traces the personal memories woven into The Giver. The Giver himself is based on Carl Nelson, a painter who lived alone in Maine when Lowry interviewed him for a magazine article in 1979. “We talk a lot about color,” she recalls. “It is clear to me that although I am a highly visual person—a person who sees and appreciates form and composition and color—this man’s capacity for seeing color goes far beyond mine.” Later, she learns that the painter has become blind. What was it like, she wondered, to lose the colors he loved? What if he could have given me the ability to see as he did? Another memory that shaped The Giver was a conversation in which Lowry’s father, nearly 90, said he couldn’t remember how his daughter Helen died. Lowry thought, “We can forget pain.…And it is comfortable to do so.” But she also wondered, “Is it safe to do that, to forget?” The conversation with her father convinced Lowry that we can forget pain, “delude ourselves into believing that suffering never took place.” She began to speculate about what would happen if a society chose to forget its pain. What would such a society be like? What price would its members have to pay? Lowry says, “All writers know that What if ignites fiction. The questions I raised to myself had no easy answers. The Giver doesn’t either.”