Lois Lenore Lenski Covey (October 14, 1893 – September 11, 1974) was a Newbery Medal-winning author and illustrator of picture books and children's literature. Beginning in 1927 with her first books, Skipping Village and Jack Horner's Pie: A Book of Nursery Rhymes, Lenski published 98 books, including several posthumously. Her work includes children's picture books and illustrated chapter books, songbooks, poetry, short stories, her 1972 autobiography, Journey into Childhood, and essays about books and children's literature. Her best-known bodies of work include the "Mr. Small" series of picture books (1934–62); her "Historical" series of novels, including the Newbery Honor-winning titles Phebe Fairchild: Her Book (1936) and Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison (1941); and her "Regional" series, including Newbery Medal-winning Strawberry Girl (1945) and Children's Book Award-winning Judy's Journey (1947).
Lenski also provided illustrations for books by other authors, including the first edition of The Little Engine that Could by Watty Piper (1930), and the first four volumes of Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series (1940–1943).
In 1967 Lenski established the Lois Lenski Covey Foundation, which provides grants for book purchases to libraries and organizations serving children who are socially and economically at risk.
Lenski was the fourth of five children born to Richard C. H. Lenski, a Prussian-born Lutheran clergyman and theologian, and Marietta Young Lenski, a Franklin County, Ohio native, who was a schoolteacher before her marriage. When Lois was six, her family moved to the small town of Anna, Ohio, where her father was called to be a pastor. Lenski was encouraged to pursue her talent for art by adults in her life, including teachers, a visiting artist—who, she later recalled, advised her father to buy her a high-quality set of paints because she had talent—and her father, who did so. But she also remembered that no one encouraged her to "be original" or draw what she saw around her during her childhood, describing her work until the age of 15 as copying from other pictures.
After commuting by train to high school in Sidney, Ohio, Lenski graduated in 1911. She then attended Ohio State University, graduating in 1915 with a B.S. in education and a teaching certificate. Her minor was in fine arts, with her coursework concentrating on drawing and lettering. After graduating from Ohio State, Lenski received a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, where she studied until 1920. During this time she also studied illustration at the School of Industrial Art in New York. In 1920, Lenski traveled to London, studying at the Westminster School of Art in 1920–21. She then spent several months traveling in Italy before returning to the United States.
On June 8, 1921, immediately after her return from Italy, Lenski married Arthur Covey, a muralist who had been one of her instructors at the School of Industrial Art and for whom she had worked as an assistant on mural projects before she left for London. Covey was a widower with two young children, and in 1929 Lenski and Covey had a son, Stephen. The family then moved from Westchester County to "Greenacres," a farmhouse in Harwinton, Connecticut, built in 1790.
Covey, who was 16 years older than Lenski, expected his wife to take full responsibility for the household and children even if doing so meant that she would have no time for creative work. Lenski, however, refused to give up, later writing that Covey's attitude helped her to realize how important her work was to her. She hired household help when she could and carved out time to work in her studio.
Influence on her literary career
As Lenski progressed in her literary and artistic career, her family and home life served as important sources of inspiration for her work. Two of the first books she wrote and illustrated, Skipping Village (1927) and A Little Girl of 1900 (1928), drew upon her childhood in small-town Ohio, which she idealized, describing it in her autobiography as "simple, sincere, and wholesome." The "Mr. Small" series of books was inspired by watching her young son Stephen and his friends play with toy trucks, airplanes and other vehicles and realizing that the children tended to see themselves as the operators of the vehicles, like the eponymous Mr. Small, rather than anthropomorphizing them into characters. She would later base two other picture book series, the "Davy" and "Debbie" books, on her experiences with a grandson and granddaughter. Her first historical novel, Phebe Fairchild: Her Book, was inspired by living at Greenacres, describing life as it could have been lived at the house in the 1830s.
In the early 1940s, Lenski was told by her doctor that for the sake of her health she needed to avoid Connecticut's harsh winters. The family began to spend their winters in the southern United States, first visiting Louisiana and then Florida. During these trips Lenski observed the social and economic differences between this region of the country and her familiar Midwest and Northeast, inspiring her to write about the ways of life experienced by children in diverse American regions. Although her writing was interrupted by illness in the early 1950s, she continued the project of writing regional stories until 1968.
In 1951 Lenski and Covey built a house at Tarpon Springs, Florida, where they spent half of each year. After Covey's death in 1960, Lenski moved permanently to Florida. She continued to write, publishing her last picture book, Debbie and her Pets, in 1971 and her autobiography in 1972. In 1967 she established the Lois Lenski Covey Foundation. Beginning in 1959, her achievements were recognized with honorary doctorates from Wartburg College (1959), UNC-Greensboro (1962), and Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, where her father had once taught (1966). In 1967 she was awarded the Regina Medal by the Catholic Library Association and the Children's Collection Medal by the University of Southern Mississippi. Lenski died September 11, 1974, at her home in Tarpon Springs.
Early artistic and literary career
Lenski's first professional goal was to become a painter. Her oil paintings were shown at the Weyhe Gallery in New York in 1927 and her watercolors were shown at the Ferargils Gallery in New York in 1932. During this period she also worked as an illustrator, beginning with jobs she took to support herself while studying at the Art Students League between 1915 and 1920. Her first publication was a coloring book called A Children's Frieze Book: To-Put-Together for Home Decoration (1918), for which she was paid $100. She also produced three books of paper dolls for the same publisher, Platt and Munk, during 1918 and 1919. In 1920 Lenski chose to study in London in part because it was the longstanding center of children's book publishing, a field in which American educators, publishers and librarians began to engage seriously only after World War I. In London she illustrated three children's books for the publisher John Lane, including new editions of two stories by Wind in the Willows author Kenneth Grahame. After returning to the United States she continued to work as an illustrator, focusing primarily on collections of folktales and fairy tales during the 1920s. Among the first books for which she provided text as well as illustrations was a collection of nursery rhymes.
In 1927, pioneering children's book editor Helen Dean Fish suggested that Lenski should try writing and illustrating her own stories. She originally wrote her first book, Skipping Village, as poetry, changing it to prose at the request of her editor. Decades later, she would return to writing poetry and song lyrics. In 1932 Lenski published The Little Family, an innovative picture book which was the first such book sized to fit small children's hands (the current edition of the book measures 5 × 5.8 inches).
Until the mid-1940s Lenski continued to illustrate other authors' books as well as her own, working with writers including Maud Hart Lovelace, Watty Piper, and Hugh Lofting. However, her biographer Bobbie Malone notes that while Lenski wrote about her work as an illustrator in the 1920s in her autobiography, she did not mention her later work of this type, even on "landmark" books like Piper's Little Engine and Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy books.