Jean Guttery Fritz (November 16, 1915 – May 14, 2017) was an American children's writer best known for American biography and history. She won the Children's Legacy Literature Award for her career contribution to American children's literature in 1986. She turned 100 in November 2015 and died in May 2017 at the age of 101.
Fritz was born to American Presbyterian missionaries Arthur Minton Guttery and the former Myrtle Chaney in Hankow, China, where she lived until she was twelve. Growing up, she attended a British school and kept a journal about her days in China with her amah, Lin Nai-Nai. The family emigrated to the United States when she was in eighth grade.
She graduated from Wheaton College in Massachusetts in 1937 and married Michael Fritz in 1941. They had two children, David and Andrea.
Fritz's writing career started with the publication of several short stories in Humpty Dumpty magazine early in the 1950s. Her first book, Bunny Hopwell's First Spring, was published in 1954 and followed in 1955 by 121 Pudding Street, a work based on her own children. She often wrote westerns and other stories of frontier America because Arthur told her stories of American heroes as she was growing up. Her first historical novel for children was The Cabin Faced West (1958). Her autobiography, Homesick, My Own Story (1982), won a National Book Award for Young People's Literature in the Children's Fiction category and was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal.
The latter American Library Association (ALA) award recognizes the year's best American children's book but almost always goes to fiction. Later, Fritz won two annual Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards for children's nonfiction. In 1986, she received the Children's Literature Legacy Award from the ALA, which recognizes a living author or illustrator, whose books, published in the United States, have made "a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children". At the time it was awarded every three years. That year she was also U.S. nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition available to creators of children's books.
New York Times outstanding book of the year citations:
1973 – And Then What Happened, Paul Revere?
1974 – Why Don't You Get a Horse, Sam Adams?
1975 – Where Was Patrick Henry on the 29th of May?
1976 – What's the Big Idea, Ben Franklin?
1981 – Traitor: The Case of Benedict Arnold
1983 – Newbery Honor Award, National Book Award, and Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor book, all for Homesick: My Own Story.
1989 – Children's Literature Legacy Award, Orbis Pictus Award, National Council of English Teachers, for 1986 The Great Little Madison (1986)
Homesick: My Own Story, illustrated with drawings by Margot Tomes and photographs (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1982); ISBN 0399209336
China Homecoming, photographs by Michael Fritz (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985); ISBN 0399211829
Surprising Myself, photographs by Andrea Fritz Pfleger (Katonah, New York: R.C. Owen Publishers, 1992); ISBN 1878450379
Frith, Margaret (November 11, 2010). "Who Are You Writing About Today, Jean Fritz?". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 2013-05-25.
Jean Fritz at the Wayback Machine (archived October 29, 2008) at Children's Book Council