Background

David McCord was born on December 15, 1897 in New York City, New York, United States. He grew up in Portland, Oregon.

Education

McCord graduated from Harvard University.

He received honorary degrees from twenty-two universities and was named an honorary doctor of humane letters at Harvard University.

Career

McCord had a varied career, first serving as associate editor and later editor of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin. During five years with the Boston Evening Transcript, he also began nearly forty years with the Harvard Fun Council as its executive director. He found time to work as Phi Beta Kappa poet at schools like Tufts College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Colby College. He worked as executive director of Harvard’s College Fund for 38 years.

His children’s poetry appeared in works such as Take Sky: More Rhymes of the Never Was and Always Is, Every Time I Climb a Tree, The Star in the Pail’ One at a Time, and Mr. Bidery's Spidery Garden.

In addition to his children’s poetry, he wrote verse for adults that appeared in works such as Odds Without Ends, And What’s More, The Crows, and Remembrance of Things Passed. He edited books, including What Cheer: An Anthology of American British Humorous and Witty Verse, and he wrote The Language of Request: Fishing with a Barbless Hook and The Fabric of Man: Fifty Years of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.

Achievements

• McCord published 550 poems, with more than 400 of them written for children. He even invented a new style, called “symmetrics,” which was a five-line verse form.
  
  The National Council of Teachers of English acknowledged his contributions to children’s verse by giving him its first national award for excellence.
  
  He got a big amount of other awards, including Golden Rose Award and Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the first national award for Excellence in Poetry for Children from the National Council of Teachers of English in 1977.
  
  Two collections of poems, The Star in the Pail and One at a Time were 1976 and 1978 finalists for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
  
  In addition to his attainments he was the first to be named Harvard’s honorary doctor of humane letters.

Works

Works Gallery

• book

  • Andrew Wyeth 1970
  • The Christmas Eve Mystery and Other Holiday Stories

• poetry

  • One at a Time: His Collected Poems for the Young

    (A single edition of McCord's sensitive children's verse c...)

    1986
  • Every Time I Climb a Tree

    (Poems deal with picket fences, cats, glowworms, cocoons, ...)

  • The Pocket Book of Humorous Verse 1946
  • Take Sky - Poems 1962