Introduction

Before Esther Forbes was a Newbery Medal and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, she was a little girl growing up in Western Massachusetts with a scorn for formal education, preferring instead to scribble out novels in secret, string-bound notebooks. No wonder she didn't follow in the academic glory of her four older siblings: as an extremely nearsighted and dyslexic student, Forbes was incessantly criticized for her poor spelling and illegible handwriting. Worse, and perhaps the source of her secretive writing, was a teacher's accusation that her assignments were plagiarized from published works. Despite this negative experience at school, Forbes was a bright young girl and never stopped exercising her passion for words. She wrote four novels before the age of thirteen, one of which, The Sons of Ugo , focuses on a pair of brothers in renaissance Italy. Ugo, a ruling nobleman, is on his deathbed, yet so afraid to die that he remains alive and suffering. With the guidance of a compassionate monk, he finds peace, and utters his final proclamation--one of his sons shall take the throne and the other shall commit to a life of monasticism. The introductory pages of this surprising and precocious work are transcribed in the section below.

To appreciate Forbes's development as an author, we must look to the significant influence of her loving and supportive family. Esther had a close relationship with her mother, Harriette Merrifield Forbes. Harriette was a historian, author, and photographer who spent much time at the American Antiquarian Society, to which they lived in close proximity. These scholarly pursuits coalesced in the book, Early New England Gravestones and the Men Who Made Them (1927), which treated the engravings as art and became one of the earliest sources of authority on the study of American gravestones. When Esther was nine, she was forced to stay home from school for long periods due to a bad case of rheumatic fever. It was perhaps during this time spent encouraging her daughter to read and write that Harriette managed to spark in Esther a similar affinity for history.

Esther's father, William Trowbridge Forbes, practiced law and later became Judge of the Probate Court of Worcester. While there is not as much evidence regarding the relationship between Esther and her father as there is between her and her mother, there is certainly a wealth of documented correspondence between the two. Esther and her father were almost constantly in communication via letters that often explored topics of human nature, an interest that seemingly stemmed from William's occupation. Along with her mother's concern for history, her father's concern for people seems influential on the daughter who became such a celebrated author of historical fiction.

Esther's print career began when she was just a child. With the help of a miniature printing press, the Forbes children and a few neighborhood friends created and distributed a publication called the Chronopax , from the Greek words "chronos" (time), and "hapax" (once), referring to fact that editions were released sporadically over the year....