SOURCE CITATION
"Betsy (Cromer) Byars." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 2nd ed., 8 vols. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Photograph provided by Random House.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Betsy Byars's works are noted for their sensitive portrayals of troubled adolescents who suffer from feelings of isolation and loneliness. A distinctive mixture of unsentimental pathos, humor, and fundamental optimism coupled with an attraction to life's oddities allows Byars to examine subjects usually considered too disturbing for young readers, such as spousal abuse and teenage sexuality. For all her success, Byars is very realistic about the writing process. "Every time I sit down to write a book, I feel like a character in that old fairy tale who, in order to survive, must turn straw into gold," she told School Librarian. "What I know about spinning straw is nil and I have learned from hard reality that no little man in a funny suit is going to pop out of the woodwork to strike a deal. . . . I'm a very practical writer. With every book, I come to halts; some are so severe that I literally have no idea how this story is going to end. I have learned to live with these faults, and if I just go on with my life as if nothing is wrong, sometimes my brain will throw me a bone."

Byars had a happy, uneventful childhood. Her family lived part of the time in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the rest of the time in the country. Byars's parents read a lot; they also encouraged their children to read. Byars did not write much as a child; in fact, she thought that writing sounded "boring." "In all my school years . . . not one single teacher ever said to me, 'Perhaps you should consider becoming a writer,'" Byars told Elizabeth Segel in an interview for Children's Literature in Education. "Writing seemed boring. You sat in a room all day by yourself and typed. If I was going to be a writer at all, I was going to be a foreign correspondent like Claudette Colbert in Arise My Love. I would wear smashing hats, wisecrack with the guys, and have a byline known round the world. My father wanted me to be a mathematician."

Byars entered college as a math major, but soon learned that the subject did not agree with her. Eventually, she switched her major to English, with much better results. In 1950, Byars married a professor of engineering and, over the next three years, gave birth to two daughters. After her husband began graduate school, Byars filled her free time with writing. At first, her intention was to write for magazines. Her first sale was a short article that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. "I was elated!," Byars recalled.

Byars published her first children's book in 1962. Byars's early books, including Clementine, The Dancing Camel, Rama, the Gypsy Cat, and The Groober, received a somewhat cool reception from critics. Of her next publication Byars remarked in Something about the Author Autobiography Series: "The first book that turned out the way I had envisioned it was The Midnight Fox. . . . I look on The Midnight Fox as another turning point of my career. It gave me a confidence I had not had before. I knew now that I was going to be able to do some of the things I wanted to do, some of the things I had not had the courage and skill to try. For this reason, and others, it remains my favorite of my books."

While many of Byars's books were based on wholly original ideas, other stories were based on incidents involving her family and friends. In 1970, Byars drew on some of these everyday experiences in order to write one of her most personal books, The Summer of the Swans. In her 1971 Newberry Award acceptance speech, Byars related how the book came about: "Several years ago I was asked to join a volunteer program to tutor some mentally retarded children. The novel came out of this experience. Although the character, Charlie, is not one of the children I tutored . . . he was an outgrowth of that experience, and the book would never have been written if I had not come to know the children I was tutoring."

The Summer of the Swans met with a warm critical reception. Ethel L. Heins, writing in Horn Book, noted that seldom "are the pain of adolescence and the tragedy of mental retardation presented as sensitively and unpretentiously as in the story of Sara and Charlie, the brain-damaged brother she loved so protectively...A subtly told story, echoing the spoken and unspoken thoughts of young people." A reviewer for Tops in the News was equally laudatory, calling the book "moving and perceptive," a story of "extraordinary understanding and warmth." The Summer of the Swans won numerous awards and, in 1974, was adapted as an ABC Afterschool Special.

The Summer of the Swans was followed by a number of other books for young people, including The Pinballs, one of Byars's most highly acclaimed works. The pinballs of the title are three children who have been abandoned or abused and have come to live one summer with the same foster parents. Together they help each other come to feel that they are not merely pinballs but have some control over their lives. Ethel L. Heins remarked in Horn Book: "The stark facts about three ill-matched, abused children living in a foster home could have made an almost unbearably bitter novel; but the economically told story, liberally spiced with humor, is something of a tour de force."

Her prolific output includes both lighthearted books, like The Cybil War, which humorously depicts the troubled friendship between two boys who are in love with a little girl named Cybil, and those that cover a more serious subject matter. In The Night Swimmers, Byars writes about three children who are left alone every evening while their father pursues his career singing country music. They often swim secretly in a nearby private swimming pool, until the youngest child is nearly drowned and the eldest child is finally relieved of responsibility for their welfare. Elaine Moss of the Times Literary Supplement concluded: "In The Night Swimmers (Byars) has written a short novel that makes the reader hold his breath, cry and laugh; not for one moment are the emotions disengaged."

Byars is also adept at depicting outcasts. In The Two-Thousand-Pound Goldfish, a boy creates imaginary horror films to distract himself from the insecurity and lack of love in his own life. Her next book, The Glory Girl, centers on Anna, the only nonmusical member of her family of gospel singers, who is befriended by her Uncle Newt, an ex-convict. In The Computer Nut, Byars joined forces with her son Guy, who provided the computer graphics that illustrate this story of a girl who gets a message from an alien through her computer. Byars also takes on more troubling subjects with a characteristic blend of realism and humor in books such as Cracker Jackson, which focuses on spousal abuse. The title character, eleven-year-old Jackson, is called Cracker only by Alma, his former babysitter, who now has a husband and small child. When the boy begins to suspect that Billy Ray, Alma's husband, is beating her, he enlists his friend Goat in a desperate rescue attempt that Lillian Gerhardt of School Library Journal characterized as leading to "some of the most harrowing but hilarious moments in the book."

A popular series of books by Byars focuses on the Blossom family and includes The Blossoms Meet the Vulture Lady, The Blossoms and the Green Phantom, A Blossom Promise, and Wanted . . . Mud Blossom. In books on another family, The Golly Sisters Go West and Hooray for the Golly Sisters, Byars introduces two women whose ignorance and exuberance lead them into and out of all sorts of adventures as they sing and dance their way westward across the continent. Set up as collections of stories for young readers, the books garnered praise for their humor and accessibility. A reviewer for the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books remarked that Byars makes a virtue of the simple vocabulary of books for beginning readers, "spoofing the choppy style with dialogue in which the childlike sisters echo each other."

Byars has also written a series of books centered on the lovesick adventures of Bingo Brown. One of the sequence, Bingo Brown's Guide to Romance, features Bingo's written attempts to spare his younger brother the same heartache when he is older. A Publishers Weekly critic concluded, "Recorded with brutal honesty, Bingo's near misses comprise an engaging narrative that is, in typical Bingo fashion, poignant and hilarious by turns." Byars is also the author of the highly acclaimed autobiography The Moon and I. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly wrote, "In a personable, highly conversational style studded with wry observations and shot through with humility and perspective, Byars shares her views on various elements of a story. . . . It is pure pleasure and privilege to be thus invited into the world of such a warm and engaging artist. This goes far beyond most memoirs in its ability to engage the reader."

Byars used her ample experience with the topic of flying in Coast to Coast. In fact, she and her husband live in a house directly on a airstrip, and their plane is housed in a hangar on the bottom floor. The story tells of how a thirteen-year-old and her grandfather make a cross-country flight in a Piper Cub. "This teenager's sheer delight in flight and her candid, spontaneous responses to the world at large--to its jewels and its warts--make this trip well worth the ride," noted a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.

McMummy weaves the tall tale of a boy who finds a mummy-shaped pod of human size that appears to call him silently. A Publishers Weekly reviewer praised the book, noting that "beneath the heady brew of mystery and humor lie poignant insights about attachment and loss." My Brother, Ant is a story told with brevity and simple sentences meant for the early reader. Byars began the twenty-first century with the publication of Me Tarzan, a tale of a young girl, Dorothy, who lands the role of Tarzan in a class play. "Like the jungle hero Dorothy imitates," wrote a reviewer in Publishers Weekly, "the tale is larger--and louder--than life, but Byars successfully juggles the ingredients of her narrative, including credible characters and dialogue, and humor that at times approaches slapstick."

"Early in my life I developed a lifelong love of two things: dogs and books. I cannot remember a time in my life when I didn't have the joy and comfort they could bring me," Byars said in Something about the Author Autobiography Series. Appropriately, she collaborated (with her two daughters, Betsy Duffy and Laurie Myers) on My Dog, My Hero, about a contest in which eight finalists vie for the title of My Hero. The following book, Little Horse, again features animals as Byars tells the tale of Little Horse, who falls in a stream and is swept away to adventure.

For Byars, writing is often a slow process. "My books usually begin with something that really happened, a newspaper story or an event in my children's lives," she told Rachel Fordyce for Twentieth-Century Children's Writers. "It takes me about a year to write a book, but I spend another year thinking about it and polishing it. Living with my own teenagers has taught me that not only must I not talk down to my readers, I must write up to them."

Byars is quick to warn aspiring writers that they should not expect to support themselves immediately with their writing. "Writing is something that has to be learned," she noted. "A writer has to put in many, many hours that seemingly never pay off. . . . Writing is solitary, unglamorous work." Byars is not all doom-and-gloom, however; for all the work a writer does, there is still a big payoff. Byars declared: "There is no activity in my life . . . which has brought me more pleasure than my writing. And the moment of receiving a package in the mail, opening it, and seeing the finished book for the first time is beyond description."

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born August 7, 1928, in Charlotte, NC; daughter of George Guy (a cotton mill executive) and Nan (a homemaker; maiden name, Rugheimer) Cromer; married Edward Ford Byars (a professor of engineering), June 24, 1950; children: Laurie, Betsy Ann, Nan, Guy. Avocation: Gliding, flying airplanes, reading, traveling, music, needlepoint, crosswords. Education: Attended Furman University, 1946-48; Queens College, Charlotte, NC, B.A., 1950. Addresses: Home--401 Rudder Rdg., Seneca, SC 29678-2035.