Author Emeritus: Eleanor Cameron

Eleanor Frances But­ler Cameron in was born in Win­nipeg, Man­i­to­ba on March 23, 1912. She attend­ed UCLA and the LA Art Cen­ter School for three years before mar­ry­ing Ian Stu­art Cameron, a print­er, in 1934. Mrs. Cameron worked as a ref­er­ence librar­i­an for many years before begin­ning to write full time, and was fas­ci­nat­ed by the way the mind took frag­ments of a writer’s life and rearranged them for writ­ing mate­r­i­al. “Sit­u­a­tions … are like usable places — mys­te­ri­ous in their abil­i­ty to arouse the writer’s cre­ative response.”

One day her son David told her of a dream he’d had that would inspire the five Mush­room Plan­et books, includ­ing The Won­der­ful Flight to the Mush­room Plan­et and Stow­away to the Mush­room Plan­et. She wrote of Cal­i­for­nia, which she knew well, in The Ter­ri­ble Chur­nadryne and The Mys­te­ri­ous Christ­mas Shell; The Court of the Stone Chil­dren, for which she won a Nation­al Book Award; and in A Room Made of Win­dows, part of a real­is­tic fic­tion series about Julia Red­fern, a twelve-year-old writer. Mrs. Cameron died in 1996, leav­ing a lega­cy of delight­ful children’s books. She also wrote exten­sive­ly about the field of children’s lit­er­a­ture and ana­lyzed her own cre­ative process in such essays as “The Seed and The Vision: on the Writ­ing and Appre­ci­a­tion of Children’s Books,” which is a part of the Ker­lan Collection.

— Julie Schuster

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