Anne Carroll Moore was born on July 12, 1871, in Limerick, Maine. She was the daughter of Luther Sanborn Moore and Sarah Hidden Barker. Anne (she was christened Annie) was preceded by two sisters, who had died, and by seven brothers. As favorite in the family, she had a special closeness to her father, a lawyer, who had served as president of the state senate. Luther Moore died on January 12, 1892, and his wife died two days later, which ended Moore's interest in the law.
Upon graduation in 1891 from Bradford Academy, a two-year college in Massachusetts, Anne Carroll began studying law under her father's instruction. While helping a widowed brother care for his children, she decided to be a librarian. She enrolled in the Pratt Institute Library School in Brooklyn, New York, in September 1895. At Pratt she was influenced by the lectures of Caroline M. Hewins, a librarian from the Hartford Public Library, who had compiled the first children's book list for the American Library Association. Hewins became Moore's lifetime mentor. Moore finished library school in June 1896.
In 1932 Moore received from the Pratt Institute a special award, the Diploma of Honour. In 1940 she was twice awarded the Doctor of Letters from the University of Maine. In 1955 she received an Honorary Doctorate from the Pratt Institute.
In the fall of 1896, the director of the school, Mary Wright Plummer, offered Moore the position of children's librarian in the Pratt Institute Free Library. Moore began work early in 1897 and soon discovered her unbounded love for children, although she would never have any herself. During the next ten years, she displayed astounding energy. She innovated programs that became common in public libraries throughout the United States. Particularly significant was her initiation of storytelling and poetry readings for children. Through her many papers at library conventions, articles in journals, and lectures to library schools, Moore deeply influenced the first generation of children's librarians. In 1900, she organized a special division for them in the American Library Association. In 1903, she published A List of Books Recommended for a Children's Library, which resulted from directing a summer library workshop for the Iowa Library Commission.
About the same time, Moore began to vacation in Europe, chiefly to meet foreign authors and illustrators of children's books, such as Beatrix Potter and Leonard Leslie Brooke, whose work she helped to popularize in the United States. While abroad, she sought to persuade European librarians of the value of children's reading rooms. On September 1, 1906, the New York Public Library hired Moore as its superintendent of work with children. Her major responsibilities were to build children's collections in the burgeoning branches of the system and to hire and direct children's librarians. She insisted there should be no restrictions on children as library patrons. She stressed exhibits and festivities to coax children into reading. Literary art, not moral suasion, should be the criterion for book selection. It was, she believed, the obligation of the children's librarians to work to improve the quality of young people's literature. Moore retired from her position in the New York Public Library in 1941. She died in New York City.
Moore's greatest contribution is her promotion of quality children's literature. She herself wrote two children's novels, Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story (1924) and Nicholas and the Golden Goose (1932). From 1919 until her death, she reviewed juvenile works for the Bookman, New York Herald Review, Chicago Sun, and Horn Book. Those reviews, most of which are compiled in books, are the first sustained criticism of children's books that encourage the writing and publishing of such works. It was through Moore influence that Stockholm opened the first European children's library in 1911. In 1960, the year before her death, she was awarded the Catholic Library Association's Regina Medal "for her pioneer work in children's library services". According to the American Libraries article, "100 of the most important leaders we had in the 20th century", Anne Carroll Moore is one of the most influential figures in 20th-century librarianship in the United States. Anne Carroll was a pioneer in the newly emerging specialty of children's literature, librarianship, and publishing.
Moore considered most children's books of the time false, owing to their one-dimensional characters and their stock plots that repressed reality, fancy, and humor, and extolled the sentimental, the heroic, and the saccharine. She weeded out Sunday-school literature and mediocre, contrived serial novels, replacing them with such books as The Scarlet Letter and Tom Sawyer. She coordinated her efforts with the schools but insisted that the library be a refuge for self-discovery and not overly tied to the school curricula.
Although frail in appearance and usually carrying a doll called Nicholas, which Moore manipulated to the delight of children, Moore spoke and acted in a decisive manner. An example of her fiber was her defense of Leo Max Frank in 1915 when he was facing execution in an Atlanta, Georgia, prison. As a child, Frank had used Pratt Library; because of this and her correspondence with him, Moore was convinced of his innocence. She visited him in prison before he was lynched.
Moore never married.
14 August 1821 - 14 January 1892
20 October 1826 - 16 January 1892
17 October 1866 - 25 January 1907
Died on 15 February 1873.
19 September 1860 - 2 April 1892
Died on 16 March 1863.
