Lucy Fitch Perkins was an American illustrator and writer of children"s books, known best for Dutch Twins and its sequels, the Twins series.
Background
Lucy Fitch was born on July 12, 1865 in Maples, Indiana to Appleton Howe and Elizabeth (Bennett) Fitch. Her father was a teacher who moved to Maples to co-found a barrel stave factory. Her mother was a teacher.
Fitch moved with her mother to Hopkinton, Massachusetts to live with her father"s patents as her father tried to recover from a financial setback from the Panic of 1873.
Education
Fitch graduated from high school in 1883 and moved to Boston, Massachusetts to attend the Museum of Fine Arts School. She graduated in 1886 and took a job as an illustrator for the Prang Educational Company of Boston.
Career
Unhappy with the Hopkinton schools, the family moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1879. She met Dwight H. in her third year at the school. Fitch started to write children"s fiction on a freelance basis for Young Folks.
A year later, she followed Walter Scott Perry to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York to become his assistant.
Fitch left on August 18, 1891 to marry and move to Chicago, Illinois. initially tended to the household, only writing on occasion. The Chicago office of the Prang Educational Company employed for the next ten years, offering her opportunities to teach and illustrate.
In 1906, published her first work, The Goose Girl, a collection of children"s rhymes. A year later, she followed with A Book of Joys: A Story of a New England Summer, but both works had limited popular appeal.
In 1911, she published The Dutch Twins, her first major work.
Grover suggested to that she design a series centered around the twins. took the advice, and the Twins series were a popular success. She published twenty-six books in the Twins series for the Houghton Mifflin Company. Foreign each book, would try to interview an individual who grew up in the given country to gain an understanding of the particular customs.
Later books in the series, such as The American Twins of the Revolution, supplanted history for geography as the basis of the twins" backgrounds. sold over two million copies of her books and was Houghton Mifflin"s most profitable author had two children: Eleanor Ellis, a writer, and Lawrence Bradford, an architect.
" book The Dutch Twins is known to have inspired popular children"s author Beverly Cleary to start reading. also provided illustrations for Edith Ogden Harrison"s series of fairy tales, published in the early years of the twentieth century.