Alexander, Lloyd Chudley (33581483): Difference between revisions

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'''Lloyd Chudley Alexander''' (30 January 1924 – 17 May 2007) was an American author and Ritchie Boy who trained at [[Camp Ritchie]] with [[:Category:Class 18|Class 18]], served as a translator and interpreter in France, and became one of the best-known writers of fantasy for young readers, winning the 1969 Newbery Medal for ''The High King'', the last of the Chronicles of Prydain.

Lloyd Chudley Alexander was born in Philadelphia on 30 January 1924 to Alan Audley Alexander, a stockbroker, and Edna (née Chudley), and grew up with his elder sister, Florence, in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, just west of the city. His parents read little beyond newspapers and bought secondhand books mainly to fill their shelves, but he taught himself to read at about four and skipped the first two grades at a private Quaker school. After his father was ruined in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 he went to public school, where he skipped another grade and entered seventh grade at nine; he read Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and mythology, especially the legends of King Arthur, and wrote poetry. He left West Chester State Teachers College after one term, finding it unchallenging, and worked for six months in the mailroom of the Atlantic Refining Company before deciding that adventure would be a better school for a writer.

Alexander entered the Army as a private at Philadelphia on 2 February 1943 (ASN 33581483). Judged too clumsy for artillery and too prone to faint at the sight of blood to serve as a medic, he briefly played cymbals in an Army band in Texas and then served as a chaplain's assistant before the Army sent him to Lafayette College to study French language, politics, customs, and geography. He then trained at Camp Ritchie, graduating as a private first class with [[:Category:Class 18|Class 18]] (section 7A, certificate 6816), and was associated with MII Team 496-G; among his fellow trainees were veterans, scholars, refugees, and Cherokee soldiers. Serving in combat intelligence and counterintelligence, he rose to staff sergeant. After a brief stay in Wales, whose castles and landscapes later shaped his fiction, and in England, he spent six months translating radio messages with the Seventh Army in eastern France and then worked as a translator and interpreter in the Paris office of the Counter Intelligence Corps until the end of 1945.

After the war Alexander studied French literature at the University of Paris. He admired the poetry of Paul Éluard, who, after seeing Alexander's translations, named him his sole English translator, and he also sought advice from Gertrude Stein, who warned him how hard a writer's life could be. In Paris he met Janine Denni, who had a young daughter, Madeleine; they married on 8 January 1946 and settled in Philadelphia, first in the attic of his parents' house, where he spent twelve-hour days translating Éluard and writing. For about fifteen years he wrote mainly fiction, nonfiction, and translations for adults while working as a potter's apprentice for his sister, an advertising copywriter (from late 1948; his earnings and translation royalties let him buy a house in Kellytown, but he lost the job after three months), a copyeditor, and a cartoonist; his wife worked in a textile mill while publishers rejected his novels for seven years. His short story "The Fantastic Symphony" (1949), inspired by Berlioz, appeared in the ''New Directions'' annual. His breakthrough came with the autobiographical novel ''And Let the Credit Go'' (1955), about his years as a teenage bank messenger, followed by ''My Five Tigers'' (1956), about his cats, ''Janine Is French'' (1959), ''My Love Affair with Music'' (1960), ''Park Avenue Vet'' (1960) with the cat veterinarian Louis Camuti, and ''Fifty Years in the Doghouse'' (1964, reissued as ''Send for Ryan''), a history of an ASPCA special agent commissioned by the society. For the Jewish Publication Society he wrote children's biographies of August Bondi, which won the 1959 National Jewish Book Award, and Aaron Lopez.

''Time Cat'' (1963), his first fantasy, about a cat that visits its other lives in different eras, was, he later said, the most creative and liberating experience of his life. Nearing forty, he turned to children's fantasy for good, and his Welsh-inspired Chronicles of Prydain culminated in ''The High King'', which won the 1969 Newbery Medal. He won the National Book Award for Children's Books in 1971 for ''The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian'' and in 1982 for ''Westmark''. ''The Wizard in the Tree'' (1975), written during a period of depression, was followed by the better-received ''The Town Cats'' (1977) and ''The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha'' (1978), set in a fantasy version of fifteenth-century Persia, which won the Silver Slate Pencil Award in the Netherlands and the Austrian Book Award. His later series were Westmark (1981–1984), about a printer's apprentice caught up in revolution in an imaginary European kingdom around 1800, and Vesper Holly (1987–1990 and 2005), about a brilliant young Philadelphia heiress adventuring in the 1870s. His picture book ''The Fortune-Tellers'' (1992), illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman, drew some criticism for placing a European-rooted tale in an African setting. In all he wrote 48 books, translated into 20 languages; he was twice nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and received three lifetime achievement awards.

Alexander helped create the children's magazine ''Cricket'' and served on its editorial board, joined the library committee of World Book Encyclopedia in 1974, and served on the board of the Friends of the International Board on Books for Young People from 1982. He kept a strict routine, rising at 4 a.m. and writing until late afternoon whether or not he felt inspired, and he corresponded with readers, some of whom visited him at home. He died of cancer at Drexel Hill on 17 May 2007, a few weeks after the death of Janine, his wife of sixty-one years; his last novel, ''The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio'', appeared that August. Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library maintains a permanent exhibit of his desk, typewriter, manuscripts, and editions.