Background

Cornelia Lynde Meigs was born on December 6, 1884, in Rock Island, Illinois, United States, but grew up in Keokuk, Iowa, where the family moved when she was an infant. Meigs was the fifth of six sisters.

Education

Cornelia Meigs attended public school as a child, after she attended Bryn Mawr College, receiving her Bachelor of Arts in 1907.

Career

After college, Cornelia Meigs taught English at St. Katherine’s School in Davenport from 1912-1913. After a time spent at home taking care of her father and writing, she joined the faculty at Bryn Mawr in 1932 and taught there until 1950. After she retired from Bryn Mawr, she taught writing at the New School of Social Research in New York City.

Her writing career began in 1915 with the publication of The Kingdom of the Winding Road, a collection of fairy tales, followed by Master Simon's Garden in 1916. From 1942 to 1945 Cornelia Meigs was employed by the U.S. War Department in Washington, D.C.

In 1949 Cornelia Meigs published her first book for adults, The Violent Men: A Study of Human Relations in the First American Congress. Over the next 20 years, she wrote adult books on the United Nations and the history of children’s literature and a novel titled Railroad West, as well as more children’s books.

Achievements

• Cornelia Meigs is best remembered for her Newbery Award-winning biography of Louisa May Alcott, Invincible Louisa in 1934. She wrote adult books on the United Nations and the history of children’s literature and a novel titled Railroad West, as well as more children’s books. Cornelia Meigs also won a Newbery Honor three times: in 1921 for Windy Hill, in 1928 for Clearing Weather, and in 1933 for Swift Rivers.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Wild Geese Flying

    (All of the Milton children loved the big white house in J...)

    1957
  • Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women

    (Biography tracing the fascinating life of Louisa May Alco...)

    1933
  • Swift Rivers

    (Newbery Honor book Barred from his family homestead by hi...)

    1934
  • Jane Addams, Pioneer for Social Justice; A Biography

    (History of Hull House and the many social reforms it insp...)

    1970
  • Fair Wind to Virginia

    (The year is 1773 and Hal and Peggy Morrow are being whisk...)

    1955
  • The Windy Hill

    (A pair of teens visiting their wealthy cousin in a sleepy...)

    1921
  • Clearing Weather

    (Young Nicholas Drury has his hands full between looking a...)

    1928
  • The Scarlet Oak

    (When Jeremy and Hugh arrive with their family to stay wit...)

    1938
  • A Critical History of Children's Literature; A Survey of Children's Books in English. Prepared in Four Parts

    (Traces the origins of children's literature from medieval...)

    1953
  • The Covered Bridge

    (Vintage juvenile fiction illustrated by Marguerite de Ang...)

    1936
  • The Trade Wind 1927
  • The Crooked Apple Tree 1929
  • What Makes a College? A History of Bryn Mawr 1956
  • The Willow Whistle 1931

Views

In her autobiographical sketch for Junior Authors, Meigs described the effort it took for her to begin her writing career and her difficulties in getting published. She concluded, "I have learned two things from this experience...one, that you must have sufficient confidence in your project to make time for it no matter what are the demands and distractions; the other, that inspiration has to be attended by intensively hard work, sometimes, even replaced by it - apparently - to bring a writing enterprise to its proper end."

Connections

Father:

Montgomery C. Meigs Jr.

Montgomery C. Meigs Jr. was an American civil engineer. The son of U.S. Army General Montgomery C. Meigs was born in Detroit, Michigan, and educated at Harvard University and in Germany. He worked for a few years for the Northern Pacific Railroad, before taking the post of a civil engineer in Keokuk, Iowa, in 1882.

Mother:

Grace Lynde Meigs

Grandfather:

Montgomery C. Meigs

Montgomery C. Meigs was a career United States Army officer and civil engineer, who served as Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army during and after the American Civil War.

References

• Hudson, D., Bergman, M., & Horton, L. (Eds.) The biographical dictionary of Iowa
  2009