Virginia E. Hamilton, 65; Writer of Kids’ Books Dealt With Black Life

Virginia Esther Hamilton often said that she wrote for “children and their older allies” because it is in young minds that most change can occur. In fact, Hamilton’s vast body of work--35 books that spanned many genres, which she termed “liberation literature”--added a new dimension to American literature by treating the African American experience as a mainstream facet of life.

Hamilton died Tuesday in Dayton, Ohio, after a 10-year fight with breast cancer. She was 65.

Over the years, her works included picture books, novels, folk stories, mysteries, science fiction and two biographies, which earned her a number of major awards. In 1974, she became the first black author to win the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in American children’s books, for “M.C. Higgins, the Great,” a story about a boy whose mountaintop home is threatened by strip mining. The book also won the National Book Award.

She was also given the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the highest honor for children’s literature, and in 1995 became the first children’s author to receive a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. Other awards include the Coretta Scott King Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal.

“Language is magic,” reads a quote from her posted on her Web site. “It has always been magic, since the time sorcerers uttered their incantations and wrote their symbols, which steeped our human past in marvelous myth. Oh, I am a believer in language and its magic monarchy! To bind its boundless spell to me is why I write.”

A contemporary pioneer of African American literature, Hamilton often drew upon her heritage, her love of history and the many stories handed to her by the adults in her life.”She never itched to write for her peers,” said her husband, poet Arnold Adoff, in a telephone interview from the couple’s Yellow Springs, Ohio, home. “She was totally committed to writing for children in the hopes that their minds would be the most open. She said her age group was 8 to 80, and why not? She never shied away from a topic. All of her issues were adult.”

Lauded as a ‘National Treasure’

Her first book, “Zeely,” published in 1967, is the story of a young girl who fantasizes that a tall, majestic woman in her town is an African queen and later finds out she really is. The book was most notable because of what it lacked thematically: the urban integration struggle of blacks, which permeated African American fiction at the time. For this reason, Carol Fiore, the president of the children’s division of the American Library Assn., called Hamilton a “national treasure.”

“It was a combination of things that made her so brilliant,” Fiore said. “While her characters were African American, they were human beings. Their experience went beyond the black experience. They were experiences that all children and all families have, and by telling us those stories we can understand all people so much better.”

Children in the 1940s were not typically educated about the contributions of blacks to literature, but Hamilton--who grew up listening to her parents’ storytelling and the black press editorials her father read out loud--began learning on her own. The youngest of five children, Hamilton was born on a small farm in Yellow Springs. Her father and mother were avid readers and storytellers who infused her with their enthusiasm for words. Hamilton read piles of comics her brothers kept and books she borrowed from the library, family and friends. And she took plenty of notes. Hamilton attended Antioch College and Ohio State University, where she majored in writing. Encouraged by her professors to move to New York to become an author, Hamilton enrolled in a course at the New School for Social Research. As she waited for her works to be published, Hamilton took on a series of jobs, including museum receptionist, bookkeeper and nightclub singer. She met Adoff, who is Jewish, in 1958 and married him in 1960 “when that was illegal in 28 states,” he said.

“She wanted to be on the shelf with Faulkner as well as with Richard Wright and Toni Morrison,” Adoff said. “The point was to be the best and never allow anyone to make you less for any reason.”

After establishing her writing career in New York, Hamilton and Adoff moved to her parents’ land in 1969 and built a house where they could raise their two children and continue writing.

She excelled at recasting ancient tales to appeal to children, said her longtime editor Bonnie Verburg. “One of the things that is highly unusual in Virginia’s work is that she has been able to combine master storytelling and a remarkable ear for spoken language with scholarly research,” Verburg said. “So you have this magnificent researcher who at the same time has a great ear for dialogue and the spoken word. She was able to find stories that had been buried and disappeared since the Civil War. She would dig them out, and what excitement when she found them!”

She wrote her manuscripts on a manual typewriter, refusing to move up to an electric model, until she caved in and bought a computer, her husband said. She became so “high-tech,” she learned how to play computer games, blasted Alicia Keys songs through the computer’s speakers and even learned Swahili online.

As prolific as Hamilton was--completing 15 books in the 10 years she was ill--her family always came first.

Adeptly Balanced Family, Writing

“She didn’t have to make any deals with the devil to write,” Adoff said. “She was a true genius in the absolute and deepest and most complex sense of the word. She understood family and the psychology of children and a husband who was a poet and all the nutty stuff that that entails. Whatever face of the prism she was looking through, she was always in complete control. She did not sacrifice anything to make her art.”

Her latest book, “Time Pieces,” a semiautobiographical novel for middle-schoolers, will be published in October by Blue Sky Press, an imprint of Scholastic.

She also left behind a handful of picture books that Adoff hopes to have published in the coming years.

In addition to Adoff, Hamilton is survived by a daughter, Leigh Hamilton Adoff, of Berlin; son, Jaime Levi Adoff, of New York; two sisters, Nina Anthony of Columbus, Ohio, and Barbara Davis of Los Angeles; and two brothers, William Hamilton of Englewood, N.J., and Kenneth James Hamilton of Chula Vista.

In lieu of flowers, her family is requesting that donations be sent to the American Cancer Society or the Virginia Hamilton Conference on Multicultural Children’s Literature at Kent State University in Ohio.