Her family moved frequently and as a child she lived all over the United States, as well as in Japan. She began her career as a photographer, freelance journalist, and part-time magazine writer during the s, and only began her career as an author in when she was forty years old. Two of her books have won the Newbery Medal: Number the Stars , a story set against the Nazi occupation of Denmark, in , and The Giver , a thought-provoking dystopian fantasy, in She has written forty books, with a fourth book in the Giver sequence in the works.
Lowry's family moved frequently because her father was a career military man, an Army dentist, who was also an avid photographer. She was born in the Territory of Hawaii but lived in Pennsylvania, Maine, and New York, where she attended high school, as well as Japan, where she lived from the age of eleven to thirteen. Lowry speaks about her time in Japan as a pivotal moment for her that has informed her writing; exploring outside their American enclave, she was a stranger surrounded by a world quite different than the one she was accustomed to, in which she was "performing the inevitable, often difficult task of the young: going out, assessing the new territory; returning, reassessing the old; and using that new knowledge to begin to create my own place in the world.
Eventually leaving the village behind. But moving on, eventually, too, to a new village of my own. After high school, Lowry attended Brown University, but dropped out of college after her sophomore year when she married Donald Lowry, a Navy officer, in As a young married woman she found herself again moving frequently, this time due to her husband's military service.
The couple had four children—in four years—and lived in California, Florida, South Carolina, and Massachussets, finally settling in Cambridge, where her husband left the Navy to earn his law degree. Lois Lowry was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her family moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in Lowry excelled in school and attended Brown University, but left school after marrying and starting a family in her sophomore year.
Lowry nurtured an early interest in writing, which gradually turned into a professional career. Her many children's books include the Anastasia series , Autumn Street , and The Giver Lois Lowry was born on March 20, , to Robert E. Hammersberg and Katherine Landis in Honolulu, Hawaii. Hammersberg, an army dentist, was called off to duty.
When six-year-old Lois entered the Franklin School in Carlisle, she had already been reading for three years. She attributed this precociousness to her mother, a kindergarten teacher, and to her older sister Helen, who read to her. Lowry's younger brother Jon was born that same year. Her mother read to her nightly, and her older sister Helen shared her knowledge about letters and words starting at just three years old.
In fact, these teachings were so impactful that Lowry was able to skip the first grade entirely. In , the Hammersberg family moved again to Tokyo, Japan. Lowry attended a special school for military families, but she felt stifled by a curriculum that did not challenge her creatively. However, she fondly remembers Japan. The family briefly moved back to Carlisle in , where she attended ninth grade, but in , they moved to Governor's Island, New York, where she attended Curtis High School on Staten Island.
In , she left school to marry Donald and move with him to San Diego, California. The couple moved around the United States several times with their four children: daughters Alix and Kristin, and sons Grey and Benjamin. According to Joel Chaston's biography, Lois Lowry , Lowry recalls the first several years of her married life as a "nice, pleasant, interlude.
As her children grew older, she found time to complete her degree in English Literature from the University of Southern Maine in Portland in After earning her BA, she pursued graduate studies at her alma mater. During this coursework she was introduced to photography, which became a life-long passion and profession.
She also took photos to accompany the articles she submitted as a freelance journalist. As Lowry nurtured her budding careers, she and Donald became less compatible, and they divorced in She would meet and marry her second husband, Martin Small, very soon after.
As a freelance journalist in the s, Lowry submitted a short story to Redbook Magazine that caught the attention of an editor at Houghton Mifflin. The story was meant for adults but was told through the eyes of a child. The editor suggested that Lowry write a children's book. She agreed and wrote A Summer to Die This novel parallels Lowry's own experience with her sister's terminal illness.
In , Lowry published her most autobiographical work, Autumn Street. The main character is a girl named Elizabeth whose father is away at war.
Elizabeth befriends her grandmother's African American cook, Tatie, and her grandson Charles. Lowry was living in Maine with her family when she decided to finish college and eventually earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Southern Maine in the early s.
In , Lowry published her first novel, A Summer to Die , which was based on her own experience of losing her older sister Helen at a young age. She was also going through some personal changes around this time, as she and her husband got divorced.
Two years later, Lowry launched her popular humorous series of novels featuring Anastasia Krupnik. She later developed another series featuring Anastasia's younger brother Sam. In , Lowry also published Autumn Street, a novel that drew further inspiration from her own life. Lowry's main character Elizabeth and her family go to live with her grandfather during World War II while her father is off serving in the military.
Lowry's pregnant mother took her and her older sister to live with her grandparents during the war as well while her father was stationed overseas. She and her family later rejoined Lowry's father and lived in Japan for a time after the war. Lowry's career reached new heights with the historical novel Number the Stars. The narrator, Annemarie Johansen, is friends with a Jewish girl named Ellen. She and her family help hide Ellen from the Nazis when they begin to round up Jewish citizens.
Annemarie also ends up helping Ellen and her family escape from Denmark. Lowry received the prestigious Newbery Award for this work.
Four years later, Lowry published one of her best-known novels, The Giver. The story takes the reader to a future community where there's no war and poverty but everyone's lives are tightly controlled. A young teen named Jonas becomes an apprentice to the title character, the only person with access to memories of the past.
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