SOURCE CITATION
"Robert Leslie Conly." 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.
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Though Robert C. O'Brien wrote few books in his lifetime, he was a respected and award-winning children's author. He was most acclaimed for his 1971 Newbery Medal-winning Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which tells the story of a group of intelligent laboratory rats who meet a mother field mouse trying to save her invalid child from death. O'Brien's fiction is noted for its exploration of serious thematic subjects, such as the duties of humans in protecting the environment and in ensuring preservation of themselves and their world. While his work tackled such difficult themes, he was also able to display, as Aidan Warlow noted in Twentieth-Century Children's Writers, "remarkable inventiveness, dramatic power, and a clear narrative style that enabled complex ideas to be felt as well as understood." A longtime editor and writer for National Geographic magazine, O'Brien published only four novels during his career, yet books were a meaningful way for him to promote discovery and understanding of the world. "When a child (or an adult) reads a book, I think his mind is getting pretty much the same kind of exercise it gets when it deals with real-life problems," he stated in his Newbery Medal acceptance speech printed in Horn Book. "As the mind-seed wonders, it grows. Having put down roots, it opens its leaves and looks around. It learns about love, hate, fear, sadness, courage, kindness. . . . But all of them come to life in books in a way that is peculiarly suitable for examination, for contemplation, and for evaluation."
"O'Brien was born Robert Leslie Conly on January 11, 1918, to an Irish family in Brooklyn, New York. (He later took the pen name of Robert C. O'Brien, since the National Geographic did not encourage outside writing by their staff members.) Shortly after O'Brien was born, his family moved to Amityville, Long Island, where he grew up and attended parochial schools. Both school and his early family life proved to be ordeals for him. O'Brien was not "an endearing, easy-going child," his wife Sally wrote in a profile for Horn Book. "Born a middle child into a literate, sharp-witted, sharp-tongued Irish family, he had an extraordinarily bad case of 'middle-itis'. . . . His mother, harassed beyond endurance, once threatened to drown him. He was sick a great deal. He despised and feared school and some mornings was literally dragged screaming into the classroom." O'Brien's problems as a child, however, were balanced by an interest in and talent for music, and he was admired for his singing and piano-playing abilities. In addition to his love of music, he also wrote rhymed poetry as a child, and completed a novel about a boy who travelled around the world in search of adventures.
"As a youngster, O'Brien "had a propensity and talent for dreaming," his wife wrote in Horn Book. "He could and did regularly create splendid imaginary worlds, with himself in dazzling, heroic roles." By his teen years, O'Brien's "fantasy world was so vivid that he (could remember) the place and hour when he (then a student in high school) made a solemn decision to give it up and to concentrate on living in the real world." During his high school years at Amityville, he began to rigorously apply himself to his music studies, rising every day as early as four A.M. to complete both schoolwork and music lessons. Writing also remained an interest during this time, and he served as editor of the school newspaper, to which he contributed verse.
"O'Brien initially pursued both music and writing after graduating from high school. He attended Williams College in Massachusetts from 1935 to 1937, but left in the middle of his sophomore year after finding the experience too stressful. After a period which he once described as a "breakdown," O'Brien was able to eventually return to school. He resumed his music studies by enrolling at New York's Juilliard School of Music, and at the same time began taking courses at Columbia University. O'Brien's parents were eventually able to persuade him to return to college full-time, and in 1940 he earned his B.A. in English from the University of Rochester, all the while continuing his music studies at the Eastman School.
"After O'Brien graduated from college, his interests in writing won out, and he began to pursue a career in journalism. In 1941 he started work at the clip desk of Newsweek magazine in New York City, and in three years became a staff writer. While at Newsweek, O'Brien met his future wife, Sally McCaslin, who was then employed as a researcher in the magazine's Books Department. The two were married in 1943, and the following year moved to Washington, D.C., where O'Brien worked as a reporter, first for the Times-Herald and then for Pathfinder magazine. In 1951 he joined the staff of National Geographic magazine, where he eventually becoming an editor and writer and had the opportunity to travel around the world on assignments.
"Both before and during his career at National Geographic, O'Brien had often thought about writing a novel for children. In 1968, when he was fifty years old, he published his first novel for children, titled The Silver Crown. The fantastical story of a young girl who obtains a silver crown for her tenth birthday, and shortly afterwards loses her family in a tragic fire, The Silver Crown depicts the existence of an ancient evil force which wreaks a variety of violent acts upon modern civilization. While the story received mixed reviews at the time of its publication, it nonetheless gained O'Brien recognition as a serious writer of children's fiction. In a 1985 reassessment of The Silver Crown for Horn Book, reviewer Susan Boulanger found O'Brien's first venture into children's literature noteworthy. Admitting that the "the plot creaks at times under damaging improbabilities and red herrings," Boulanger praised its "interlocking complexities of meaning and reference," and noted that the central character "learns to act effectively to defuse a threat, to preserve what she has come to value in the world and in herself."
"Three years later marked the appearance of O'Brien's most acclaimed children's novel, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Earning numerous awards, including the prestigious Newbery Medal for the highest annual achievement in the field of children's literature, Mrs. Frisby has been popular among readers and critics alike. A fantasy story about a determined mother field mouse who, while trying to save her invalid child from a farmer's plow, meets intelligent rats from a research laboratory, Mrs. Frisby was praised for its entertaining exploration of human themes through animal characters. "This most unusual story well deserved its Newbery Medal," wrote a Junior Bookshelf reviewer. "It combines successfully two usually incompatible styles of narration, animals with human names and in human situations, and an accurate study of wild life. It is a beautifully written and thought-provoking book."
"In the novel, O'Brien explores serious questions facing modern industrial society: whether, as Warlow noted, man should "create a competitive mechanised society that exploits and eventually destroys its environment," or should strive towards a society that "respects the individual and natural resources." O'Brien commented in Horn Book on how he decided to write about rats to explore such concerns. "I have no recollection at all of Mrs. Frisby's initial appearance in my thoughts. . . . (However,) I do know some of the thinking and reading I had done before I wrote about Mrs. Frisby, and I know that these must have been connected with her sudden appearance. I had been, and still am, concerned over the seeming tendency of the human race to exterminate itself--as who is not? I have wondered: If we should vanish from the earth, who might survive us? What kind of civilization might follow ours? I had read in a scientific journal that scorpions were good candidates for survival. . . . I read the same about cockroaches. But I was unable to imagine a cockroach or a scorpion civilization. . . . Still thinking about survival, I began to speculate: Rats are tough, highly adaptable to a changing environment, and enormously prolific. Maybe, if people should eliminate one another by means of war or pollution, rats would be the survivors. Or if not the only survivors, perhaps the most intelligent."
"O'Brien followed Mrs. Frisby with A Report from Group 17, a novel that mixed political intrigue with questions stemming from scientific research. His last book, Z for Zachariah, was published two months before his death in 1973, and is a science-fiction thriller that tells the story of two children who survive a nuclear war. Related through the diary of one of the children (a sixteen-year-old girl), the novel displayed O'Brien's recurring concern with the ability of humans to wreak havoc and destruction upon the world. Throughout his career as a writer, O'Brien saw writing fiction as a way to safely explore potential solutions to such complex problems. In fiction writing, as he stated in Horn Book, "we make a world, and put people in it, and make things go wrong, all without doing any damage at all to the real world. Then we activate our characters, and they set to work solving problems we have given them. . . . The problems in a book can be much more horrendous than any we would willingly face in real life, and the solutions can be more ingenious."
PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born January 11, 1918, in Brooklyn, NY; died of a heart attack, March 5, 1973, in Washington, DC; married Sally McCaslin, 1943; children: Christopher, Jane, Sarah, Catherine. Avocation: Music, gardening, and furniture making. Education: Attended Williams College, 1935-37, Juilliard School of Music, New York, NY; Columbia University, and Eastman School, New York, NY; and University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, B.A. (English), 1940.
CAREER
Author and editor. Worked in advertising agency, 1940; Newsweek, New York, NY, 1941-44, began working at clip desk, became researcher, then staff writer; Times-Herald, Washington, DC, rewrite man, 1944-46; Pathfinder, Washington, DC, news editor, 1946-51; National Geographic, 1951-73, became senior assistant editor.
