They raised her in a house of secrets after her father won sole custody of her in a bitter divorce, he initially told Fitzhugh that her mother was dead. When Fitzhugh was born on October 5, 1928, her parents’ marriage was already falling apart. “She was a precocious only child,” Brody writes, “the darling of the household, and used to getting her way.”īrody’s biography reveals how Fitzhugh rebelled against her life of privilege, developing an independence of character that she passed on to her most notable creation. She started out life in lace baby clothes made in Paris, surrounded by servants who were charmed by the little girl’s fondness for such delicacies as peach pies and Queen tarts. Instead, her parents raised her in wealth and comfort in Memphis, Tennessee. As chronicled in Sometimes You Have to Lie (Seal Press), Leslie Brody’s new biography about author/illustrator Fitzhugh, Harriet’s creator grew up far from the sights, sounds, and smells of Manhattan’s bustling streets. She sips chocolate egg creams at the local luncheonette, meets her friends in Carl Schurz Park, and rides the subway to Rockaway Beach in her never-ending quest to gather fresh material for her writing, making such notations as: “I bet that lady with the cross-eye looks in the mirror and just feels terrible.”īut despite her urban pedigree, it turns out that Harriet had decidedly Southern roots. She prowls New York’s Upper East Side (specifically the neighborhood of Yorkville), notebook at the ready to write down her observations as she spies on her neighbors. Welsch, the plucky, 11-year-old protagonist of Louise Fitzhugh’s YA classic Harriet The Spy, seems a thoroughly Manhattan-ized character.
0 kommentar(er)
