Occupation Writer Role Writer Name Ruth Gannett | Nationality American | |
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Born August 12, 1923 ( 1923-08-12 ) Movies Elmer's Adventure: My Father's Dragon Books My Father's Dragon, The Dragons of Blueland, Elmer and the Dragon Similar People Peter Kahn, John Newbery, Kenji Terada | ||
My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles GANNETT read by as101 | Full Audio Book
Introduction to Ruth Stiles Gannett - Author of "My Father's Dragon"
Ruth Stiles Gannett Kahn (born August 12, 1923) is an American children's writer best known for My Father's Dragon and its two sequels—collectively sometimes called the My Father's Dragon or the Elmer and the Dragons series or trilogy.
Contents
- My Fathers Dragon by Ruth Stiles GANNETT read by as101 Full Audio Book
- Introduction to Ruth Stiles Gannett Author of My Fathers Dragon
- Education
- Writing career
- Personal life
- Works
- References
Education
Gannett graduated from City and Country School in Greenwich Village, New York City, in the class of 1937. There, she recalled in 2012, "she benefited from being 'allowed and encouraged to write for fun' at certain times of the day". She then attended Vassar College, graduating with a B.A. in chemistry in 1944.
Writing career
Gannett's first novel, My Father's Dragon, was published by Random House in 1948 and was a runner-up for the annual Newbery Medal recognizing the year's "most distinguished contribution" to American children's literature. She wrote two more novels in that series, Elmer and the Dragon and The Dragons of Blueland. The books were illustrated by Ruth Chrisman Gannett, her stepmother, and the typography was designed by her husband, H. Peter Kahn. They have been translated into fourteen languages.
Gannett wrote two other short children's novels, The Wonderful House-Boat-Train (1949) and Katie and the Sad Noise (1961), illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg and Ellie Simmons.
Kirkus Reviews covered two of the books briefly, showing disappointment in both Gannett's and Eichenberg's work on the house-boat-train and unusual enthusiasm for Gannett's story in a starred review of The Dragons of Blueland.
Personal life
Ruth Gannett married artist, art history professor, and calligrapher H. Peter Kahn, (1921–1997). The couple have seven daughters and eight grandchildren. She lives near Trumansburg, New York, near Cornell University, where Peter Kahn was employed for forty years. She is the great-granddaughter of Ezra Stiles Gannett.
Works
Sometimes called the "Elmer and the Dragons series", the three short novels were written by Ruth Stiles Gannett and illustrated by her stepmother Ruth Chrisman Gannett.
50th Anniversary omnibus edition: Three Tales of My Father's Dragon (Random House, 1998), OCLC 37030387.
Gannett introduced the 1991 Yearling edition of Edith Nesbit's collection The Book of Dragons (OCLC 696817759), later issued in the Looking Glass Library (2013, OCLC 869499406).