One of the most familiar names in children's literature is Barbara Cooney. Illustrator and author supreme, she has won two Caldecott Awards (Chanticleer & the Fox and Ox-Cart Man ) and numerous other prizes for her work and for good reason. She has created some of the most beautiful and important books in the field. She now wears a new title, that of philanthropist, for she recently gave $550,000 to the Damariscotta, Maine Public Library. The tiny town, 50 miles north of Portland, had a library in need of repair and enlargement and Barbara Cooney's gift will make that happen.

Barbara Cooney now makes her home in Damariscotta although she was born in an entirely different setting: Room 1127 of the Bossert Hotel in Brooklyn, New York. Her artistic endeavors as a child were encouraged by her mother, who was an artist herself. Barbara graduated from Smith College and then briefly attended art school in New York. Just one year after graduation, she had her first commission, the illustrations for Ake and His World by Bertil Malmberg and she was off. Since then Barbara Cooney has illustrated over 100 books. After receiving her second Caldecott, she began to write them as well and it's become hard to decide which she does better. She says that a picture book is like a string of beads with the illustrations being the jewels but the text is the string that holds them all together.

She married a doctor, Charles Porter, and the couple lived in Massachusetts where they raised four children. She has said that three of the books, Hattie and the Wild Waves, Miss Rumphius, and Island Boy are as close as she will ever come to autobiography and readers will find similarities in them to her life. Like Miss Rumphius, Ms Cooney has traveled widely and she surely has made the world more beautiful with her work. She now lives in a house in Maine overlooking the sea. She may not have grown up on Tibbet's Island as Matthais did, but Maine is her chosen home and she relishes it with equal delight to his. Hattie and the Wild Waves depicts the affluent life of an unconventional and questing child growing up in Brooklyn, New York. Enough said?

Her first illustration work used etching and scratchboard techniques. Later picture books use collage, watercolor, acrylics and mixed media. Much of her work has a translucent and luminous quality and her depiction of depth and distance, as in the seascape scenes in Miss Rumphius is wonderful. Although many of her characters are small, they are never depicted as insignificant, even when shown in vast spaces. Although her pictures are strong and good, they never dwarf the text but expand and illuminate it. The careful research allows her to capture a time in the past with startling realism as in Emily and Hattie and the Wild Waves. Wendy Kesselman had based her story, Emma, on the life of artist Emma Stern and Barbara Cooney's illustrations are based on Emma Stern's paintings. Although her illustrations go from primitive to realistic, they are beautifully detailed and there is something so totally Cooney in her books that we seldom have trouble identifying them as hers.

From Publisher

As a child Great-aunt Alice Rumphius resolved that when she grew up she would go to faraway places, live by the sea in her old age, and do something to make the world more beautiful - and she does all those things, the last being the most difficult of all.