Jane Yolen Wrote Over 400 Books. Her Daughter Read the Last One Aloud.
There is a fact about Jane Yolen's death that is, in the way of the best fiction, both completely true and almost too neat to be believed. She died on June 12, aged 87, with her daughter Heidi reading Owl Moon aloud at her bedside — the same picture book Yolen published in 1987, illustrated by John Schoenherr, that won the Caldecott Medal and became the closest thing to a universally beloved children's book the late 20th century produced. Her son's music filled the room. She went gently, said Heidi, with no pain or stress.
Yolen wrote more than 400 books. Say that number aloud and let it settle. Four hundred. Spanning fantasy, folk tales, science fiction, poetry, picture books, Holocaust fiction, historical novels, and a great many things that refused to fit neatly into any of those boxes. The breadth is either absurd or magnificent, depending on your tolerance for productivity in others. Those who read her as children tend toward the latter.
Her best-known work is The Devil's Arithmetic (1988), in which a bored, assimilated Jewish girl from New York is transported to 1942 Poland. It's the kind of book that doesn't explain itself, that trusts its young readers to sit with horror and not flinch. It became a TV film. It earned the word "important" without straining for it. She received six honorary doctorates and, one imagines, considerably more letters from children than most professors of literature.
Born in New York City and educated at Smith College, she worked as an editor before her first book — Pirates in Petticoats, 1963, about women pirates. The first in a very long line of subversions dressed as entertainment for children who hadn't yet learned that certain stories were supposed to belong to certain people.
What Yolen understood, and what those who merely write for children sometimes forget, is that young readers are not a market segment to be addressed from a safe distance. They are people who have not yet learned to pretend that difficult things aren't difficult. The best children's literature — the kind she wrote most of her life — does the rare thing: it tells the truth at the right height.
She leaves behind a daughter reading aloud, a son playing music, and more than 400 books. For a life measured in pages, that is not a bad accounting.
