Phyllis Crawford was, during the 1930s and 1940s, a celebrated author of books for children in their early teens.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas

Little Rock, Arkansas

Little Rock is the capital and the largest city of the U.S. state of Arkansas. The Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 699,757 people in the 2010 census...

, she graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in 1920 and then from library school at the University of Illinois in 1924 and became an editorial assistant for H.W. Wilson. In 1930, she published her first children's book The Blot: Little City Cat. In 1938, she wrote Hello the Boat!

Hello the Boat!

Hello the Boat! is a children's historical novel by Phyllis Crawford. Set in 1817, it follows the journey of a store-boat down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cincinatti. The novel, illustrated by Edward Laning, was first published in 1938 and was a Newbery Honor recipient in 1939....

(Holt, 1938), which won the top prize of $3,000 from the Julia Ellsworth Ford Foundation and was a 1939 Newbery Award honoree.

Subsequent books were In England Still (Arrowsmith, 1938), Walking on Gold (Messner, 1940), The Secret Brother (Holt, 1941), Last Semester (Holt, 1942), Second Shift (Holt, 1943) and Let's Go! (Holt, 1946). She also wrote an adult novel, Elsie Dinsmore on the Loose (Cape, 1930).