Name Milton Meltzer Role Historian | ||
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Awards Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, Regina Medal Nominations National Book Award for Children's Books, National Book Award for Children’s Books (Nonfiction, Hardcover) Books Never to Forget, Rescue, The American Revolutionaries, Slavery, Ten queens Similar People Walter Harding, Langston Hughes, Lydia Maria Child, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Seymour Drescher | ||
Milton Meltzer (May 8, 1915 – September 19, 2009) was an American historian and author best known for his history nonfiction books on Jewish, African-American, and American history. Since the 1950s, he was a leading author of history books in the children's literature and young adult literature genres, having written more than 100 books. He won the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his career contribution to American children's literature in 2001.
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Life
Meltzer was born in Worcester, Massachusetts to Benjamin and Mary Meltzer, semi-literate immigrants from Austria-Hungary. One of three sons, Meltzer was the only child to graduate from high school, furthering his education at Columbia University from 1932 to 1936, he had to drop out of college before graduating to support his family after his father died of cancer. Meltzer became a writer for the Works Project Administration, a program designed by the Federal Government to provide jobs for the millions of unemployed during the Great Depression.
Meltzer wed Hilda "Hildy" Balinky on June 22, 1941. After serving in the Army during World War II, Meltzer was a writer for the CBS radio broadcasting network and later a public relations executive for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. While traveling the country for Pfizer, Meltzer did research at historical societies, local archives and museums and collected nearly 1,000 illustrations to begin a career writing history books with a focus on social justice. Meltzer co-authored with Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes, A Pictorial History of the Negro in America published in 1956.
The Meltzers had two daughters and two grandsons. Hildy Meltzer died in 2009. Meltzer most recently lived in New York City where he died at the age of 94 from esophageal cancer.
Writing
Meltzer's books often chronicled struggles for freedom, such as the American Revolution, the antislavery movement of the nineteenth-century United States, and the movement against antisemitism. He wrote several biographies, including ones of Langston Hughes and Thomas Jefferson, and though most of his books are nonfiction, he wrote at least one historical novel, The Underground Man, about a white abolitionist in the 1800s United States who is imprisoned for helping escaped slaves. Meltzer won several awards for single books and career achievements. In 2003 he received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award from the professional children's librarians, which recognizes a living author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made "a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children". The committee noted that he "continues to be a model for informational writing today" and cited four works in particular: Brother Can You Spare a Dime?; Ten Queens; All Times, All Peoples; and The Jewish Americans.
The two books by Meltzer most widely held in WorldCat participating libraries are Never to Forget: the Jews of the Holocaust (1976) and Rescue: the story of how gentiles saved Jews in the Holocaust (1988). The latter is classified as juvenile literature and was soon published in a German-language edition.
Other
Meltzer was an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a lecturer at universities in the United States and England, as well as professional meetings and seminars. He did work on various documentary films such as History of the American Negro and Five.
Military
Meltzer served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, where he served as an air traffic controller and rose to the rank of sergeant.
Death
Milton Meltzer died at his home in New York City from esophageal cancer on September 19, 2009, aged 94.