SOURCE CITATION
"Phyllis Reynolds Naylor." 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 by Mary Noble Ours and provided by Simon & Schuster.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor is a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction for children, adolescents, and adults. She is perhaps best known as the author of Shiloh, which won the Newbery Medal in 1992, and for the "Alice" series. In In writing about young adults she displays strong empathy for their concerns and understanding of their feelings. Critics hail her ability to create believable, appealing characters and to write from a young person's point of view. Taken as a whole, Naylor's writings are notable for their great diversity, ranging from books about her own life to fiction exploring contemporary problems facing young people. Naylor enjoys the change of pace that comes with varying her subjects and writing for different audiences. "I can never imagine myself writing only for children or only for adults," she commented. "I like to follow up a mystery story for the nine-to-twelve set with a contemporary novel for adults; after that perhaps I will do a picture book, or a realistic novel for teens, or possibly a humorous book for children. The marvelous thing about writing is that I may play the part of so many different people--an old grandmother on one page, a young boy the next; a middle-aged man or a girl of fifteen. I feel most whole when I can look at a scene through the eyes of several different people."

"The author was born January 4, 1933, in Anderson, Indiana, to a strongly religious family with conservative, midwestern values. Because her father was a traveling salesman, Naylor moved frequently and considered no one place "home." During the summers, her family vacationed either in Iowa, where her mother's parents lived, or in Maryland, where her father's parents had settled after moving from Mississippi. Though both sets of grandparents lived on farms, their personalities and environments were very different. Her grandparents in Iowa were isolated from any other neighbors and were staid and reserved by temperament. "Hugs were reserved for arrivals and departures, and in between was the practical, no-nonsense business of the day to attend to, without emotion or fuss," Naylor wrote in How I Came to Be a Writer. In contrast, her other grandparents were outgoing and lived in walking distance from the neighbors in the town of Marbury, Maryland, where her grandfather was a church pastor and her grandmother a midwife. Consequently, during her visits there she came into contact with many more people and had a more lively time. In How I Came to Be a Writer Naylor related how this grandmother, called "Mammaw," gathered children for Sunday school: "On Sundays, my southern grandmother would pile us all in the car early and go traveling about the back roads of Charles County with a trunk full of donated clothes. At every home along her circuit, she would stop and see if the children were ready for Sunday School. If they were, they would climb aboard. If the excuse was no clothes to wear, Mammaw would simply open the trunk, find something the right size, and another child would be crammed in the backseat."

"Naylor's summertime experiences made a great impression upon her and, she drew on memories of Iowa in writing To Make a Wee Moon and Beetles, Lightly Toasted, and of Maryland in writing the books Revelations, A String of Chances, and Unexpected Pleasures. "I never once thought of Maryland as my home, any more than I thought of all the other places we had lived as home but, quite without knowing it, I was soaking up the setting for future books," Naylor commented in How I Came to Be a Writer. She added, "By the time I placed a second novel . . . in Marbury, and then a third . . . , I realized this small southern Maryland town had worked its way into my blood."

"One constant in Naylor's early life was storytelling and reading. Though she grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s and her family did not have a lot of money, Naylor stated that she never felt poor because her family owned good books. Her parents enjoyed reading stories to the children--her father would imitate the characters in Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer--and her mother read to them every evening, "almost until we were old enough to go out on dates, though we never would have admitted this to anyone," Naylor wrote in How I Came to Be a Writer.

"During grade school Naylor eagerly began writing her own stories, as she relates in How I Came to Be a Writer: "Each day I would rush home from school to see if the wastebasket held any discarded paper that had one side blank. We were not allowed to use new sheets of paper for our writing and drawing, so books had to be done on used paper. I would staple these sheets together and sometimes paste a strip of colored paper over the staples to give it the appearance of a bound book. Then I would grandly begin my story, writing the words at the top of each page and drawing an accompanying picture on the bottom. Sometimes I typed the story before stapling the pages. And sometimes I even cut old envelopes in half and pasted them on the inside covers as pockets, slipping an index card in each one, like a library book, so I could check it out to friends and neighbors. I was the author, illustrator, printer, binder, and librarian, all in one."

"When Naylor was sixteen she began writing stories and poems for a church paper at the invitation of a former Sunday school teacher. Encouraged, she decided to send short stories to widely read magazines such as Jack and Jill and Highlights for Children. She came to realize, though, that her writing was not yet professional when her stories were returned with rejection slips. "My dreams of fame and fortune had vanished," she related in How I Came to Be a Writer. "They were replaced with a new respect for the business of writing."

"In 1951, at the age of eighteen, she got married, and after graduating from Joliet Junior College she moved with her husband to Chicago, where he worked on an advanced degree. She found a job as a clinical secretary at the university hospital, and then taught third grade for six months on a temporary teaching certificate.

"When Naylor was twenty-three, her husband began to display symptoms of mental illness. She felt great pressure to write stories in order to pay for their rent and other expenses, as she later related in her nonfiction book, How I Came to Be a Writer: "One day, while we were living in Chicago, my husband suddenly showed signs of severe mental illness; he believed that the professors at the University were trying to kill him. For the next three years, while we moved from state to state, hospital to hospital, I wrote in earnest and in panic to support us. Sometimes I would take a whole afternoon and go off to a remote spot just to brainstorm--writing down ideas however they occurred to me until finally I had a list of plots to see me through the next few months." Finally, after moving her husband to a hospital in Maryland, she was hired as a typist by the Board of Education's psychology office in Rockville, and then worked a year for the Montgomery County Education Association. Eventually she lost hope that her husband would recover from his disease--diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia--and decided to divorce him. The laws at that time made this a difficult procedure, because they required that her husband be declared incurable. Meanwhile, she fell in love, and when she succeeded in divorcing her first husband, she married Rex Naylor, a speech pathologist, on May 26, 1960.

"Returning to school to become a clinical psychologist, Naylor earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from American University. At this point, though, she knew that she wanted to be a full-time writer and canceled plans for graduate school. Instead she began a family and wrote a column about family life that was published in church magazines. She also began a humorous column for teenagers that would continue for twenty-five years. In 1965 she published her first book, a short story collection called The Galloping Goat and Other Stories. Her first children's novel, What the Gulls Were Singing, appeared two years later. Since then she has published one or more books each year.

"In 1977, enough time had passed that Naylor could write about the painful experience of having a loved one become mentally ill. She discussed her book Crazy Love: An Autobiographical Account of Marriage and Madness in an interview for the American Audio Prose Library: "I knew that was a good story, beginning with the first insinuations that something was wrong and going through all the hell that you go through living with a paranoid schizophrenic. . . . The big problem was how to write this without making it sound like violins were in the background, and had I written it before I'm sure it would have been a horrible book. . . . But when you get fifteen years down the road and you look back, there were funny parts of it. "

"In her 1987 young adult novel The Keeper, she imagines a teen-age boy's reactions to his father's mental illness. Nick sees his father become paranoid and distrustful and attempts to help him, but finally struggles to convince authorities that his father needs to be admitted to an institution. The book was well-regarded for its insightful and believable portrayal of Nick's responses and emotions.

"Several of Naylor's other novels for young adults grapple with sensitive issues and problems. In A String of Chances, Evie, the daughter of a Maryland preacher, faces her doubts about her religious faith when her cousin's baby suffers crib death. Because it questions religious beliefs, the book caused some controversy among religious fundamentalists. The Solomon System describes how two adolescent brothers cope with their parents' divorce. Gayle Berge of School Library Journal judged The Solomon System "a very realistic look at the heartache and loneliness that divorce causes children to bear." In her 1985 novel, The Dark of the Tunnel, Naylor addressed the subject of a parent's death, describing an eighteen-year old boy whose mother is dying from cancer. John R. Lord in Voice of Youth Advocates considered it "one of the best adolescent novels" on the subject of death, primarily because the book "concerns itself with the dying process and the recognition of the two young people and their mother."

"Not all of Naylor's books are so serious, though. Well-known among her novels are trilogies noted for their Gothic suspense and mystery. Her first "Witch" trilogy, published during the 1970s, includes Witch's Sister, Witch Water, and The Witch Herself, and concerns a young girl who suspects her sister and a neighbor of witchcraft. The "York" trilogy, which appeared during the 1980s, features the character Dan Roberts in Shadows on the Wall, Faces in the Water, and Footprints at the Window. The teenager confronts the present worry that he might inherit a disease and encounters the supernatural when he travels back in time to fourth-century England. Naylor also has many humorous novels to her credit, including How Lazy Can You Get?, a comedy about kids who outwit their baby-sitter, and Beetles, Lightly Toasted, about a boy who wants to win a conservation contest at school. This prompts him to devise recipes using bugs as ingredients, which he tests on unsuspecting classmates. In The Great Chicken Debacle, four children try to hide a live chicken from their parents for a week.

"Naylor continues to sympathize with the young, as with her "Alice" novels, beginning in the 1980s with The Agony of Alice. Alice, a pre-teen in the first book, searches for a female role model after her mother's death. Naylor has continued to write about Alice and the trials and tribulations of growing up. More than fifteen installments have been published so far, including Alice Alone, which focuses on Alice breaking up with her boyfriend. "It's the flip side of love," handled by Naylor in the usual way--with honesty, wit, and compassion," wrote Stephanie Zvirin in Booklist. A reviewer for Horn Book Magazine noted, "The Alice books continue to offer readers an accessible role model as well as support and encouragement along the way to adulthood." In an inteview published on childrenslit.com, Naylor noted that girls ask her to keep the series going as Alice becomes an adult, marries, has children, and nears retirement. She also said that she gets letters from grown women wanting to know what will happen to Alice next.

"In addition to Shiloh, based on an abused dog she found in West Viirginia, Naylor has written two sequels to her novel, Shiloh Season and Saving Shiloh. In an assessment of the award-winning Shiloh, Betsy Hearne of Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books commented that young readers will be "absorbed by the suspenseful plot, which will leave them with some memorable characterizations as well as several intriguing questions." In Booklist, Ellen Mandel wrote, "Naylor offers a moving and powerful look at the best and the worst of human nature as well as the shades of gray that color most of life's dilemmas."

""I am not very interested in writing about the wealthy, probably because I was never one of them," Naylor once commented. "While the rich, too, suffer disappointment and loss, money does help. But when a person with little education, money, or social skills faces the same problem, that, to me, is more of a challenge. 'How on earth is he going to solve this?' I wonder, and so I begin."

"Naylor continues to tackle tough issues, such as discrimination, hate crimes, and tolerance, which are the themes of Walker's Crossing. Set in Wyoming, a seventh-grader, Ryan, sees his older brother join a militia group that dislikes immigrants, minorities, and government. Through a learning process, Ryan discovers the importance of being fair and decent to everyone. "A gripping novel with believable characters, it focuses on some important topical issues," wrote a reviewer in the Tampa Tribune. "Walker's Crossing" should be read by parents, as well as readers ten to fourteen, and then discussed as a family.

"Discrimination of a different sort is portrayed in Sang Spell, in which Naylor weaves an account of Josh Vardy's mystical sojourn after his mother's death into a story of the Melungeons--people of Mediterranean ancestry living far up in the fills of Appalachia. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly commented that Naylor "combines the elements of Brigadoon and Lost Horizon with little-known historical lore to creat a haunting story of a youth's journey from dissolution to wholeness."

"In an interview with the Internet Public Library, Naylor said that it is appropriate to tackle uncomfortable issues in books for children, but that these topics aren't for all writers. "Yes, it is important to raise social, racial and political issues, but only by writers who feel intensely about such things," commented Naylor. She went on to say, "It is also important to remember that the story is everything. If it is well done, the message will be so much a part of it that the author doesn't even have to think about it. Writers should not write a book to preach a sermon."

"Never at a loss for ideas, Naylor once commented that her "biggest problem is that there are always four or five books waiting in the wings. Scarcely am I halfway through one book than another begins to intrude. I'm happy, of course, that ideas come so easily, but it is like having a monkey on my back. I am never quite free of it. Almost everything that happens to me or to the people I know ends up in a book at some time, all mixed up, of course, with imaginings. I can't think of anything else in the world I would rather do than write." Similarly, in How I Came to Be a Writer she declared, "On my deathbed, I am sure, I will gasp, 'But I still have five more books to write!'. . . I will go on writing, because an idea in the head is like a rock in the shoe; I just can't wait to get it out."

UPDATES
May 3, 2004: Naylor won the 2004 Edgar Allan Poe award for best juvenile writing for Bernie Magruder & the Bats in the Belfry.Source:. Mystery Writers of America website: http://www.mysterywriters.org, May 3, 2004.