SOURCE CITATION
"Gertrude Chandler Warner." 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 Albert Whitman.
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Gertrude Chandler Warner, the author of the popular "Boxcar Children" books, once commented, "I am telling the exact truth when I say that my sister and I began to write when we were just able to hold a pencil. (She later was known as an essay writer, author of Endicott and I, and more than once was compared favorably with a renowned essayist.) As children, we received from our mother a ten-cent blank book to prevent the house from being littered with scraps of paper containing a 'good word' or a full sentence, or even a whole article.
"My first book was an imitation of the 'Uptons Gollwag' book, consisting of verses illustrated with watercolors of the two Dutch docks and the Gollwag, a bestseller of that day. I always said I could write better if I had a decent pencil, and this was true. It seemed that our household never had a new pencil, but the worst old stubs, sharpened with a kitchen knife. I gave the Gollwag book to my grandfather, a born child lover, and every Christmas thereafter gave him a handmade book. The second one being an imitation of Gelett Burgess 'Goops.'
"When we girls were eighteen and twenty, my mother had a serious talk with us saying it was a nice idea to write but not to anticipate earning any money from it. She would be surprised if she knew how wrong she was."
Warner did not become an author immediately after that little talk. She started teaching elementary school during the teacher shortage caused by World War I, even though she had never finished high school due to her frequent illnesses. She continued teaching until 1950. She wrote several books, including works for hire for a religious organization and the original "Boxcar Children" book, while she was teaching, but it was after her retirement that she began writing in earnest.
"My writing seems to coincide with an illness," she said. "Finally, I discovered that writing coincided with enforced leisure. The Boxcar Children was the most important of these efforts. I had to stay at home from school because of an attack of bronchitis. Having written a series of eight books to order for a religious organization, I decided to write a book just to suit myself. What would I like to do? Well, I would like to live in a freight car, or a caboose. I would hang my wash out on the little back piazza and cook my stew on the rusty little stove found in the caboose."
As a child, Warner lived across the street from a train station, and she was fascinated by the cabooses with their traveling kitchens for the railroad workers. It was from this experience that she got the inspiration for The Boxcar Children, a book about four orphans who make their home in an abandoned railway car. The first version of the book was published in 1924, but it was not until a revised edition was published in 1942 that the book became truly popular. She once commented, "I do not know how many editions this book has come to. I rewrote the Boxcar Children from ordinary childish language in a prescribed vocabulary of six hundred words and 15,000 running words. This is used as a school book for non-readers up to age eighteen."
Warner continued, "Most of this writing has been done in spite of frequent ill health. At one time or another, I have broken my back in an auto accident and have broken first one hip and then the other. . . . I have had spells of making a butterfly and moth collection, a la The Girl of the Limberlost, collecting pressed wild flowers, and I learned all the birds by sight and sound which are indigenous to this region at age eight.
"I played the piano for the Pages of Arthur and learned the planets and constellations in order to teach them to the boys. The result of this sortie was a book called My Star Book. At times I had beautiful gardens, spaded and planted by me. Sweet williams, sweet alyssum, zinneas, phlex, forget-me-nots, holly hocks and petunias interspersed with carrots, radishes, parsnips, and all varieties of tomatoes, staked and tied up. My best parsnips were dug out of the frozen ground of February with an axe.
"With every occupation, I wrote about it. . . . Yes, I have a procedure. When setting about a new book, I have a dozen black 'Sharpie' pens and a one-hundred-page notebook. I have a special workroom furnished, typewriter, paper cutter, easy chair, etc., with violets on the wallpaper and in artificial bouquets. Almost all my writing started in copying someone else's style without plagiarism. . . . I find Talking Book records of infinite importance, as I cannot see to read. I can listen to Adam Bede again, or the latest modern novel which I find unnecessarily vulgar. I have faith that this is a trend which will soon swing back into a well-written good story."
Warner died in 1979 in the same town where she had lived for her entire life--Putnam, Connecticut--but the Boxcar Children live on. Over sixty new "Boxcar Children" mysteries have been written by others since Warner's death, and Warner's original nineteen stories remain popular as well. The "plot lines are not at all dated," School Library Journal contributor Mary-Ellen Raup commented of "Boxcar Children" and Surprise Island, the second book in the series. Readers were similarly appreciative: When "Boxcar Children" series was reissued in paperback in 1989, the original book sold around two hundred thousand copies and the sequels around fifty thousand each.
PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born April 16, 1890, in Putnam, CT; died August 30, 1979, in Putnam, CT; daughter of Edgar Morris and Jane Elizabeth (Carpenter) Warner. Avocation: Engrossing, crewel embroidery. Education: Attended Yale University. Politics: Republican. Religion: Congregationalist.
CAREER
Grade school teacher in Putnam, CT, 1918-50. Freelance writer, 1919-79. Involved in publicity work for the American Red Cross, beginning 1917; service chair for Connecticut Cancer Society, beginning 1950.
